Why 'Your Name' Should Be Hailed As An Anime Film Classic

your name

In Japan, Your Name has become a box-office phenomenon, and been hailed as a new animé classic. What’s surprising, upon seeing it, is that Makoto Shinkai’s movie lives up to the advance billing. It’s a bright, bubbling teen-movie shot through with mythical romanticism and trenchant cultural melancholy. It’s a body-swap comedy that’s also a time-hopping fantasy, and a portrait of Japanese society itself. And it brings together these many, seemingly-competing elements with an elegance that’s unexpected; bending gender, genre, and the space-time continuum into graceful new shapes.

It’s such a wild, ambitious, multi-layered, ever-shifting work that no synopsis can even scratch the surface. But, to start: Mitsuha is a small-town girl living a life big on traditional rituals: making braided bracelets, staging sake-making ceremonies, venturing to various Shinto shrines. It’s, for many viewers —both local and foreign— an idyllic vision of Japan, but for a new-millennial kid, living in a town without café, library, culture, jobs, or future, it’s something to yearn to escape. So, when she wishes —upon a comet— that she was a handsome boy living in Tokyo, soon she wakes up in the body of Taki, a Shibuya schoolboy with an after-school restaurant job and cash in his pocket.

Each, it turns out, enters the body of the other in their dreams, routinely switching back-and-forth. And, once they’ve gotten used to their new genitals, and using the proper grammatical masculine/feminine forms, they set about enjoying their dual lives: Taki taking over the girls’ basketball team; Mitsuha, in his body, using her needlepoint skills —and ease with females— to strike up a romance with the glamorous Miss Okudera. They develop a system so that the other can know what’s happened in their lives whilst they’ve been gone, keeping a running diary and meticulous schedule in each other’s phones.

Where most body-swap comedy movies are about simple lessons —parents and children, or husbands and wives, discovering empathy via walking a mile in their counterpart’s shoes— director Makoto Shinkai has far bigger philosophical fish to fry. Here, Mitsuha and Taki are one soul divided; mirroring reflections —female/male, country/city, traditional/modern— that amount to a singular Japanese identity. And, in such, they’re drawn magnetically to each other, destined —the shippin’ audience hopes— to be together.

Only, fate, a comet, an environmental tragedy, the gulf of time, and the varying paradoxes of time-travel stand in their way. There’s obvious echoes of Mamoru Hosoda’s own animé classic The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, but there’s even hints of filmed entertainments like Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind or Hendrik Hangloegten’s Summer Window. Due to its wild invention and earnest portrayal of adolescent love, Your Name has earnt Shinkai comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki. They’re ones he can never live up to; Miyazaki earning his legendary status long ago, his films creating whole new universes.

Instead, Your Name feels not as if Shinkai is summoning the voices of others, but refining his own. His 2011 film Children Who Chase Lost Voices was heavily in debt to Ghibli whimsy, but it was bookended by a pair of unexpectedly beautiful romances: 5 Centimetres Per Second and The Garden Of Words; each about lovers, seemingly fated to be together, being torn apart by time. The Garden Of Words found Shinkai’s style coming into its own; the animator obsessed with natural phenomena —water, rain, waves, wind, blossoms, sunlight, celestial bodies— and depicting their moments of liminal, fleeting beauty. Rather than inventing psychedelic fantasias, Shinkai anchors his animations in photorealist imagery. Your Name’s story may be the stuff of wild dreams and sci-fi frontiers, but its drawings positively ache with humanity. His dizzying screenplay has enough reversals and revelations to be entertaining, but its heart is what makes Your Name phenomenal.

the founder

The Founder doesn’t sound like a great film: John Lee Hancock —the guy who made The Blind Side and Saving Mr. Banks— authoring the biopic portrait of Ray Kroc, the businessman behind the birth of McDonald’s. And, sure enough, its first hour lives up to those fears: feeling like a origin-story ad-reel for one of our multinational overlords, filled with delightful Eureka moments that mark the birth of fast-food staples, and modern America. Silverware, silver-service, long waits, milkshakes made from milk, icecream that is icecream: be gone! Here is the new standard, served cheap and fast and under the heavenly glow of those golden arches. Forget product placement, The Founder, at first, plays like a veritable hamburger commercial.

But, the film harbours a secret in its secret sauce: a script written by Robert Siegel; former editor of The Onion, author of the screenplays for The Wrestler and Big Fan. Though Hancock surely hasn’t taken this idea to its logical conclusion, Siegel wanted to model The Founder in the mode of There Will Be Blood, a portrait of frontiersmanship, brutal business practice, and figurative —as well as literal— milkshake drinking.

And, so, Michael Keaton’s Kroc is an All-American figure, in every sense of the term. At first, he’s a failing salesman, schooled in self-help and glad-handing, but constantly glomming onto the wrong onto the wrong business opportunities/get-rich-quick schemes. But, he’s a born hustler, unafraid of rolling up his sleeves; and, once he discovers the original McDonald’s restaurant in California, and hatches a plan to erect burger-joints from coast to coast, then finds other protestant-work-ethic types as franchisees. It’s a portrait of the American way, of the noble notion of a meritocracy, and of the killer capitalist combination of a winning idea and hard work.

Well, up until a point. That point could be when he first sees Linda Cardellini —a vision of blonde desire he has to have, despite the fact he’s hitched to Laura Dern, she to Patrick Wilson— or when he goes behind the backs of the McDonald brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) to cut them out of their own restaurant, or when the devilish B.J. Novak arrives and recasts Keaton not as noble restaurateur, but cut-throat real-estate tycoon. The lack of an obvious tipping-point shows the nimble writing of Siegel’s script, in which Keaton’s transformation from struggling entrepreneur to ruthless prick happens right before your eyes, with an elegance that’s discomforting. Keaton is forever rolling up his sleeves, but, somewhere along the way, he starts getting his hands dirty.

In the same way, the hamburger commercial starts to play as ultimately, utterly unappetising. Like the man it chronicles, McDonald’s itself underwent a similar heel-turn, going from simple hamburger shack to monocultural behemoth, its impact on environment, workers’ rights, and global markets making it a true villain, on screen and off.

billy lynn's long halftime walk

Ang Lee’s filmography isn’t bullet-proof: there was his awful Hulk, the execrable Taking Woodstock, and wonky Civil War Western Ride With The Devil. But the 62-year-old director has toured amongst genre, across oceans, and through time with aplomb: his back-to-back of Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution two masterworks that bore next to nothing —plot, genre, cinematography, time-frame, culture, language— in common. With his last film, Life Of Pi, Lee made, perhaps, the most artful exploration of 3D as directorial tool. And, now, with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Lee shoots with cutting-edge technology —ultra-high frame rate and resolution— in a film that attempts to capture both the surrealism of war, and of an American Football halftime show.

Its titular character, played by Joe Alwyn, is an American War hero in 2004, a teenaged Texan soldier brought back from Iraq for a publicity tour that’ll climax with a halftime spectacular in Dallas on Thanksgiving. As he’s put through his PR paces, he’s beset by flashbacks to his time serving on the ground, and, to the fresh-off-the-boat homecoming that recently reunited him with his loving sister, Kristen Stewart. She wants him to leave the military life, he feels devoted to the men he serves alongside; this the film’s elemental, tearing tension.

But Billy Lynn is no character study. It’s, moreso, a portrait of bellicose Bush-era America, the war-on-terror an oil-money exercise requiring positive propaganda. Alwyn finds himself made into a hero, his tale into media narrative; the problem with heroism, he realises, that it means your story is no longer your own. In the film’s most effective shots, POVs show us people —billionaires (Steve Martin channeling Jerry Jones), oil barons (a duly oily Tim Blake Nelson), infatuated cheerleaders (Makenzie Leigh of James White), ordinary Joes— staring at Alwyn down the barrel of the lens, looking at him as blank slate, awaiting  theirprojection. They see in him what they want, or what they need; every time someone says something idiotic and self-serving, he and his troops roll their eyes.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is, in part, a satire of evangelical American warmongering, and the American way. Its showstopping event isn’t its final revelation of the whole harrowing wartime-heroism ordeal, but an arena pageant spectacular, replete with PTSD-triggering firework explosions. It’s the essence of America in one variety-show song-and-dance number: show-business, the military industry complex, and that most far-right of sports —grid-iron— political bedfellows, frolicking together in one Destiny’s Child-centred romp.

That blind, scoundrel’s patriotism is forever undermined. There’s an amazing scene in which Alwyn weeps whilst saluting the national anthem —every bit the poster-boy for US militarisation— but, it turns out, in his mind he’s imagining fucking Leigh, fantasising about the normal passions denied to him by his military service.

In turn, there’s a meta-narrative in which Chris Tucker plays a producer trying to turn their story of wartime derring-do into a movie, providing a running commentary on not just the Hollywood business model, and the tropes of ‘inspirational’ stories, but on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk itself.

The satirical side doesn’t quite sit with the film’s own earnest attempt at capturing the experiences of war; at honouring the particular bonds between soldiers, the sacrifices and struggles of service. Nor does Lee’s particular brand of surrealist visual invention quite work. The ultra-high-frame-rate creates a form of dislocating, distracting hyper-realism, and the mannered performances —save Stewart, amazing as always— often feel tentative, boxed-in. In its ultra-high-res visuals, there’s blinding clarity; the film’s awkwardness on show, bright as —or, hell, even brighter— than day.

i, daniel blake

Ken Loach’s 24th film has become one of his most acclaimed, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and stirring countless hearts as it fills arthouses everywhere. In a career filled with agitation and activism, Red Ken’s latest social-realist study takes on the bureaucracy, inefficiency, and idiocy of privatised public services. Its titular character (Dave Johns) is a joiner in Newcastle, recovering from a jobsite heart-attack. His doctor is concerned with his recovery, but the company appointed to mete out his healthcare payments deems him fit to work.

Thus, just like that, he falls between the cracks: unable to work but ineligible for payments, lost in a maddening dance of automatic-prompt phone-calls, repetitious hold music, soulless waiting-rooms, and ridiculous jobseeker mandates. At the same time, he meets a single mother (Hayley Squires) who’s been forced to relocate to Newcastle, it the only place public housing can be found; she, too, another human being being dehumanised by a society that’s reduced her to a number in a queue.

It’s an effecting, effective portrait of bureaucracy-as-nightmare, but, for all its profound humanity, the script by Paul Laverty ­—Loach’s longtime screenwriter— feels a little too heavy-handed; its climax delivering a grand theatrical gesture closer to soap-opera than social-realism.

the fencer

The Fencer is, in many ways, a stark film set in a dark time in Estonian history: in the wake of WW2, where the country was handed from Nazis to Soviets, Hitler to Stalin, one occupying force to another. Estonian men, who’d been forced to serve in the German army, were now seen as enemies of the state, hunted down and banished to Siberian gulags. That’s where Märt Avandi finds himself: a former competitive fencer now on-the-lam, hiding out in a rundown smalltown, hoping his past doesn’t catch up to him. Director Klaus Häro uses this experience to portray life in a totalitarian society: that state of paranoia that sets in when the Secret Police loom over every shoulder, in every shadow.

But, sadly, The Fencer is also an Inspirational Sports Movie, in which —as the tropes of the genre go— a down-on-his-luck ex-champ ends up at some end-of-the-line outpost, coaching a rag-tag group of hardscrabble kids. Slowly and surely —via some training montages— these kids start to get a grip on fencing, and when there’s a big tournament in glittering Leningrad on the horizon, these never-gonna-bes morph into the plucky underdogs, toppling their well-heeled, better-appointed foes. With the Secret Police circling, and Avandi’s fate in the balance, our lovable scamps must fence like they’ve never fenced before, clawing their way towards the unlikeliest of heroic at-the-buzzer victories. It’s a generic climax for a film that, in many ways, is made of much sterner stuff.

like crazy

Like Crazy is a buddy comedy in which Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Micaela Ramazzotti play a pair of psychiatric-home residents who do a runner, fleeing their medicated lives and alighting on a road-movie of lovable hijinks and journeys into tragic back-story. Bruni Tedeschi is a pollyanna socialite who, raised in high-society wealth, treats the world as her oyster; assuming everyone around her as servant, ready to cater to her delirious flights of manic whimsy. Ramazzotti, in contrast, is a skeletal wraith covered in bruises and tattoos, a self-harming, tortured soul with a dark disposition and even darker past. Together, this mismatched pair —they’re the original odd couple!— have lessons to teach each other, ways to help their new friend heal.

Paolo Virzì, last seen making the social-satirical psychological thriller Human Capital, manages to dodge the dubious nature of his set-up. Tellingly, he never plays mental illness —be it by the main characters, or any other residents— for zany caricature or cheap laughs. The comedy is, by most standards, fairly broad; but, given this is an Italian comedy we’re talking about, Like Crazy is, in that context, a picture of subtlety. It’s interested in human behaviour and fractured psychology, and, best of all, is blessed by a garrulous, magnetic turn from Bruni Tedeschi that gives the film a genuine shot of infectious energy.