Your Name
Directed by Makoto Shinkai
Released in 2016
Genre: Drama/Fantasy
The highest selling anime (Japanese animated) movie in history.
Themes: Romance, time, disaster, rescue, mystery
Performance: I have reviewed an animated movie or two already on this blog and have already discussed the difficulties that come with trying to analyse the performance of said movies considering the actor's are only ever heard, never seen. This does not mean that the performance is any less important though. In a film that relies exponentially on the interactions between the two protagonists and all those around them means a good performance is any less key, in fact maybe even more so. And from the highest grossing anime film of all time, you'd only expect that it'd have amazing performances and you'd be right. The story's about two teenagers of the opposite sex, one living in Tokyo and one living in a quiet village much farther away. The female, Mitsuha, dreams of one day moving to Tokyo and having an exciting life, getting married and moving away from her boring, quiet village being a slave to her families traditions. The male, Taki, has no obvious goals towards the beginning. One day, they wake up in each other's bodies and this trend continues to happen a few times every week at random. Already, from this short synopsis that only barely touches on the story, we can see how it's heavily emotion based. Surprise, realization, wonder, excitement, confuse, astonishment. Just imagine all of the emotions that would go through your head if you swapped bodies with somebody who seemingly lived your dream life. Both lead actor's do a terrific job of portraying this through their voices as a few times, I turned away from the screen but could still tell what the characters felt by the varying tones. Of course the facial expressions drawn by the animators also helped but neither can work without the other. At no point did I ever notice a voice not matching the face that was producing it.
Mise-en-scene: First off, the film is simply beautiful. Beautifully animated in every way. A lot of production value went into this and it was undoubtedly worth it. Secondly, I touched slightly upon it in the last paragraph when I mentioned the animators conveying emotion, but that was definitely not nearly enough explanation. Mitsuha is a very quiet, shy girl with big dreams. Taki is a brash, stereotypical boy who's lazy, short-tempered and ill-mannered. These two characters obviously have contrasting personalities. So without actor's on screen, how does a film manage to show that these two extremely different people are in their own bodies, or each other's considering it happens at random and there's no real indication. When Mitsuha first finds herself in Taki's body, she's very confused, as she should be. But we see that she hasn't quite realized what's happening yet and is still acting just as she normally would. In a plot that can get very confusing at points, the body language of said characters that show their personality is an amazing indicator of who's in the body we're looking at. So we see Mitsuha in Taki's body, being very shy, guarded and timid, practically shrinking in class, being extremely polite to everyone and due to everyone's reactions, also drawn very well and realistically, we see this isn't Taki's normal behaviour so it must be Mitsuha. This is the exact same when Taki is in Mitsuha's body. We see Mitsuha's normally polite nature turn very casual and un-ladylike. Kicking over desks, sitting open-legged, wearing her uniform in a scruffy manner, all let us know just by looking this is Taki in Mistuha's body. Even the hair which is normally so neatly tended too is frayed.
Released in 2016
Genre: Drama/Fantasy
The highest selling anime (Japanese animated) movie in history.
Themes: Romance, time, disaster, rescue, mystery
Performance: I have reviewed an animated movie or two already on this blog and have already discussed the difficulties that come with trying to analyse the performance of said movies considering the actor's are only ever heard, never seen. This does not mean that the performance is any less important though. In a film that relies exponentially on the interactions between the two protagonists and all those around them means a good performance is any less key, in fact maybe even more so. And from the highest grossing anime film of all time, you'd only expect that it'd have amazing performances and you'd be right. The story's about two teenagers of the opposite sex, one living in Tokyo and one living in a quiet village much farther away. The female, Mitsuha, dreams of one day moving to Tokyo and having an exciting life, getting married and moving away from her boring, quiet village being a slave to her families traditions. The male, Taki, has no obvious goals towards the beginning. One day, they wake up in each other's bodies and this trend continues to happen a few times every week at random. Already, from this short synopsis that only barely touches on the story, we can see how it's heavily emotion based. Surprise, realization, wonder, excitement, confuse, astonishment. Just imagine all of the emotions that would go through your head if you swapped bodies with somebody who seemingly lived your dream life. Both lead actor's do a terrific job of portraying this through their voices as a few times, I turned away from the screen but could still tell what the characters felt by the varying tones. Of course the facial expressions drawn by the animators also helped but neither can work without the other. At no point did I ever notice a voice not matching the face that was producing it.
Mise-en-scene: First off, the film is simply beautiful. Beautifully animated in every way. A lot of production value went into this and it was undoubtedly worth it. Secondly, I touched slightly upon it in the last paragraph when I mentioned the animators conveying emotion, but that was definitely not nearly enough explanation. Mitsuha is a very quiet, shy girl with big dreams. Taki is a brash, stereotypical boy who's lazy, short-tempered and ill-mannered. These two characters obviously have contrasting personalities. So without actor's on screen, how does a film manage to show that these two extremely different people are in their own bodies, or each other's considering it happens at random and there's no real indication. When Mitsuha first finds herself in Taki's body, she's very confused, as she should be. But we see that she hasn't quite realized what's happening yet and is still acting just as she normally would. In a plot that can get very confusing at points, the body language of said characters that show their personality is an amazing indicator of who's in the body we're looking at. So we see Mitsuha in Taki's body, being very shy, guarded and timid, practically shrinking in class, being extremely polite to everyone and due to everyone's reactions, also drawn very well and realistically, we see this isn't Taki's normal behaviour so it must be Mitsuha. This is the exact same when Taki is in Mitsuha's body. We see Mitsuha's normally polite nature turn very casual and un-ladylike. Kicking over desks, sitting open-legged, wearing her uniform in a scruffy manner, all let us know just by looking this is Taki in Mistuha's body. Even the hair which is normally so neatly tended too is frayed.
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