Blisteringly beautiful and existentially exhilarating, Your Name feels something like Charlie Kaufman anime. Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, who adapted his own novel, the movie focuses on a high-school girl in rural Japan and a similarly aged boy in Tokyo who inexplicably find themselves switching bodies. (It has something to do with the gorgeous meteor shower that opens the film and is revisited later in a trippy, watercolor montage that rivals 2001.) Though it deals in the cosmic and mystical, Your Name is mostly defined by its visual realism; the way it captures sunlight, fog, and mist is astounding. Along those lines, a recurring, quotidian motif that connects the two characters is the image of sliding doors, seen from the angle of the floor. For Taki, in Tokyo, these are the tracks of subway doors; for Mitsuha they’re the panels in her traditional home. Your Name considers grander things as well—gender fluidity, the importance of empathy, apocalypse—but never at the expense of the personal, and therein lies its power.
