I’ve heard so many good reviews about Your Name, although I didn’t watch it, I was curious to see the second anime movie from the same director Weathering With You. The scores in all the main ratings platforms were very high, from 90 % of Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. But for me, it was .. dull and boring. I can appreciate animes, I was an otaku since I was 8 and I think these kind of movie animes are for a specific interest which I’m not targeted and that’s fine.
What Worked For Me
Let’s start on a positive note. The artwork is simply astonishing. As in a lot of anime movies, we cannot deny the fact that they have taken the technologies to the next step. In this movie, they have put tremendous effort in the little droplets falling from the sky, the leaves, each and every detail and element of the nature was replicated perfectly.
I like the message where no matter what we do with Nature, it finds a way to be back to its original form.
What Didn’t Work For Me
The whole concept of magic and the real world. During the whole movie I was waiting for that moment where I can go “ooh ahhh a sense of clarity has come to me I can see where he’s going now” but all I had was plot holes everywhere until it became clearly the story wouldn’t go anywhere near the complexity I was anticipating.
The general plot is as follow: Tokyo is cursed with heavy rains, and there are a few girls who are believed to be sunshine girls who can pray to the sky and clear the sky whenever they want. The protagonist falls in love with ta sunshine girl, but there’s a sacrifice to all that praying. It supposed to make sense when you read it like that but somehow, they turn it into a messy flawed storyline where they want to say too much at the same time. Here’s a sequence about climate change, here’s a sequence about youth struggling, oh and here’s a sequence about the dark world of Tokyo, here’s a sequence of a litte guy who has more game than the main character at 8 years old.
A lot of people telling me that this was a romantic movie and I should see the romance component, but to be honest, I was not moved by any emotional scenes where the guy pours all his feelings moments in the movie. The only time I went “Ohw that’s cute.” is when the girl brought him a free cheeseburger in McDonald’s because he’s been ordering it for 3 days straight.
Have you watched it yet ? And what did you think?
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I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m actually very much looking forward to it. I’ve really enjoyed many of Makoto Shinkai’s previous works, with favorites being Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days. I also enjoyed Your Name, though not as much as his older works. Your Name began in a way that I worried where it was going, that it was shifting into a particular type of movie that just didn’t fit with what I was used to with his work. But it didn’t take long before I started enjoying it. As you said, though, these types of movies aren’t for everyone.
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In all honesty, I was onboard with this film for 90% of the runtime, but the ending completely lost me. It had a real “screw you, got mine” vibe to it that made it extremely unappealing. If the narrative acknowledged this, I could’ve accepted it, but it felt like it tried to have its cake and eat it, which makes it a fairly weak effort despite its ambition. It was definitely a major step down from Your Name.
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