Since its release at the end of August in Japan, Makoto Shinkai’s latest movie Kimi no Na wa, or Your Name, has gone onto to be the most successful film of the year making in excess of $100 million at the Japanese box office.
The film has sold 8.5 million tickets and earned 11.1 billion yen, or around $111 million. That makes it the highest-grossing film in Japan this year, even beating the hugely successful Godzilla Resurgence.
For anyone that is familiar with Shinkai’s prior work, then Kimi no Na wa is very much in line with that; so visually sumptuous and with an intricate narrative.
Based around the lives of Mitsuha Miyamizu and Taki Tachibana, both end up swapping bodies and intermittently experiencing parts of each other’s lives. However, not is all as it seems and there’s a great deal more going on here than it first appears.
Shinkai has said that he took a great deal of inspiration from 12th century tale Torikaebaya Monogatari, which is a story about two siblings that have mannerisms of those from the opposite sex, which helps to explain where the body swapping plot device came from.
This traditional element, as well as the now more common theme of how Japan copes with natural disasters, has clearly resonated with moviegoers in Japan.
For me, I grew up on books like Griffin and Sabine, where a man and a woman can see each other’s lives and write to one another. So the premise of Kimi no Na wa is something that I find deeply fascinating.
The animation quality has also not been lost on many Japanese anime fans and some are even pinning their hopes on Shinkai being the vanguard of the next wave of Japanese animation.
Either way, Kimi no Na wa has done phenomenally well in Japan and it will be interesting to see whether that success will continue once it is eventually released in the West.
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