Your Name

• 1. Introduction

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  Your Name began, in a sense, on the ruined streets of a fishing village called Yuriage. Its director, Makoto Shinkai, visited the town in July 2011, months after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami had struck it. Looking at the wreckage, he thought, "this could have been my town." Out of that thought came an idea: swap the positions of the villagers with the people watching from safety.

  That idea grew into a film about two teenagers who begin waking up in each other's bodies without warning. A boy in Tokyo and a girl in a rural mountain town share days they never chose. What connects a fictional comet crashing into a fictional town to a very real disaster on Japan's coast? And how do two people who spend the whole story trying to learn each other's name end up unable to let go of one another?

• 2. Two Strangers, One Body

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  Mitsuha Miyamizu lives in a rural town, bored enough that she wishes she could be reborn as a boy in Tokyo. Her wish comes true when she begins intermittently swapping bodies with Taki Tachibana, a high school student and part-time waiter in Tokyo's Shinjuku ward. On certain days they wake up as each other, living the day in a stranger's life before reverting to their own bodies during sleep. They set rules for coexisting, writing messages to each other on paper, through their phones, and directly on their own skin.

  Taki is impulsive and quick to quarrel, so much so that when Mitsuha first wakes up in his body, she finds his cheek bandaged from a recent fight. A running gag follows him into her body too. Each time he wakes up as Mitsuha, Taki starts fondling her chest in amazement, stopping only when her younger sister Yotsuha catches him. Mitsuha, for her part, condemns his perversions the moment the two of them finally meet.

  Mitsuha, while wearing Taki's body, arranges a date for him with his coworker Miki Okudera. Taki, while wearing hers, raises Mitsuha's popularity among her classmates.

  Their ages turn out to be stranger than either of them realizes. Taki was born on the 1st of December, 1998, and Mitsuha on the 1st of December, 1995, exactly three years apart to the day. Shinkai has said the coincidence was barely intentional: "In their mind, they both kind of assumed that they were both born on December 1."

  When Taki finally goes on that date himself, Okudera enjoys his company but senses he is distracted, preoccupied with someone else. Realizing his feelings run deeper than he expected, Taki tries to call Mitsuha directly, and the call fails to connect.

  Neither of them yet knows that when Taki next searches for an explanation, he will find only wreckage where Mitsuha's town used to stand.

• 3. Itomori's Comet

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  Taki travels to the Hida region with Okudera and his classmate Tsukasa Fujii, searching for a town he can no longer name. Unable to recall it, he sketches the town from memory, and a ramen-shop owner in Takayama recognizes the drawing as Itomori. What they find there is ruin. Itomori has been almost entirely destroyed by fragments of the comet 279P/Tiamat.

  At the Hida City Library, the group learns that Mitsuha and her family were among the 500 people killed. The comet passed in 2013, three years before Taki's own time, meaning Mitsuha has already been dead the whole time he has known her. Taki begins losing his memories of her almost as quickly as he uncovers the truth.

  Desperate, Taki rushes to the shrine's Goshintai and drinks Mitsuha's kuchikamizake, then faints into a vision of much of her life. In it, he learns Mitsuha once traveled to Tokyo to find him, and that she passed him the crimson kumihimo braid he has worn as a bracelet ever since. He wakes in Mitsuha's body on the morning of the autumn festival, and her grandmother Hitoha senses something is wrong. She tells him directly that the body-switching has run in their family for generations.

  To force an evacuation before the comet's fragments hit, Taki enlists Mitsuha's friends Sayaka and Tessie to destroy the town's substation and hijack its emergency broadcast system. At twilight, the only hour their two timelines can touch, Taki and Mitsuha meet face to face for the first time. He returns her kumihimo braid, and they try to write their own names on each other's palms, but night falls before Mitsuha can finish hers.

  Back in Itomori, Mitsuha confronts her father Toshiki, the town's mayor, who had ordered residents to stay put, and persuades him to call an evacuation instead. As her memory of Taki fades, she discovers what he wrote on her hand instead of his name: "I love you." Taki wakes in his own time with no memory of Mitsuha at all.

  Five years later, Taki has graduated from university, still troubled by a melancholy he cannot explain, fixated on the story of a meteor strike that killed hundreds in Itomori yet spared its people through a last-minute evacuation order. On the 8th of April, 2022, he spots a woman on a passing Tokyo subway train, and the two of them race through the station to find each other. On the steps, calling out at last, both Taki and Mitsuha ask the other for a name.

• 4. Blood And Thread

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  Mitsuha and her younger sister Yotsuha serve as miko, Shinto shrine maidens, at Miyamizu Shrine, a role passed down through their mother's side of the family. Their mother, Futaba, once held the same role. She died of a severe illness at age thirty-six, born in Itomori in 1971 and dying there in 2007.

  Futaba's husband, Toshiki, was a folklorist and anthropologist who had come to Itomori for research. He gave up both his career and a prior engagement to marry her. After her death, horrified by how the town's residents had treated her as merely their miko, Toshiki renounced the priesthood. He turned to politics instead, becoming mayor two years later. Born in Nara in 1959 and once based in Kyoto, he traded the shrine's traditions for the prestige the Miyamizu name carried in local politics.

  It is this belief, that a single god governs both time and the bonds between people, that Hitoha teaches her granddaughters above all else.

• 5. The People Around Them

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  Taki works part-time as a waiter at Il Giardino delle Parole, an Italian restaurant in Shinjuku, alongside his best friends Tsukasa Fujii and Takagi. His coworker there, Miki Okudera, a University of Tokyo student and four years his senior, is the one Taki has a crush on before any of the body-swapping begins. Tsukasa later learns, during the search for Mitsuha, that Okudera is a smoker, discovering it while the two spend a night together on the road.

  By the story's epilogue, Okudera reappears wearing an engagement ring and tells Taki she is getting married. According to Shinkai, her fiance is Tsukasa himself. The director has said the two are meant to marry despite a seven-year age gap between them.

  In Itomori, Mitsuha's closest friends are Sayaka and a classmate nicknamed Tessie, the son of the local construction company's president and a devoted reader of a magazine devoted to the occult and paranormal. Tessie is deeply conflicted about his hometown. In the manga adaptation he says, "It makes me want to destroy it all, leaving only beautiful memories." Sayaka belongs to the school's radio broadcasting club, a detail that becomes essential when Taki and Tessie later need someone to broadcast a false evacuation alert. By the epilogue, Sayaka and Tessie are teasing each other about their own upcoming marriage.

  One more teacher recurs across Shinkai's films: Yukari Yukino, who instructs Mitsuha's class in classical Japanese and had already appeared in his earlier film The Garden of Words.

  Several of these characters resurface again in Shinkai's next film, Weathering with You, among them Mitsuha working a jewelry counter in a Shinjuku mall and Taki, now an architecture graduate, specializing in disaster prevention.

• 6. Born From Yuriage

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  Critics later grouped Your Name with two of Shinkai's subsequent films, Weathering with You in 2019 and Suzume in 2022, as what they called a "disaster trilogy," built around Japan's recurring natural disasters. Shinkai delivered his first film proposal to Toho on the 14th of September, 2014, under a working title drawn from a verse in a waka attributed to the poet Ono no Komachi. The title changed at least once more before settling on Kimi no Na wa, released internationally as Your Name. Shinkai confirmed he was writing its storyboard on the 31st of December, 2014.

  For inspiration, Shinkai turned to a handful of earlier works: Shūzō Oshimi's manga Inside Mari, Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma ½, and the Heian-period tale Torikaebaya Monogatari. All three center on characters who swap identities. He also cited Greg Egan's short story The Safe-Deposit Box and Christopher Nolan's 2014 film Interstellar as influences. His team also revisited its own earlier work for reference. That included Crossroads, a 2014 television advertisement for the company Z-kai, and Shinkai's own 2007 film 5 Centimeters per Second.

  The fictional town of Itomori has no real counterpart, but its backdrop borrows from the actual city of Hida and its public library.

  The film's score was composed by Yojiro Noda, lead vocalist of the rock band Radwimps, whom Shinkai asked to write music that would essentially speak for the characters rather than merely underscore them. That soundtrack, credited widely with helping drive the film's popularity, placed as runner-up for Best Soundtrack at the 2016 Newtype Anime Awards, with the song Zenzenzense runner-up for Best Theme Song.

  A month before any of this reached theaters, Shinkai released a light-novel version of the same story, giving audiences a first way into Mitsuha and Taki's world.

• 7. A Record-Breaking Run

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  Your Name premiered at the 2016 Anime Expo in Los Angeles on the 3rd of July, 2016, followed by a Japanese theatrical release on the 26th of August that year. In Japan, the film topped the box office for twelve non-consecutive weekends. That run included nine straight weekends at number one before Death Note: Light Up the New World took over in the last weekend of October. It returned to the top for three more weeks before Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them overtook it. Domestically, the film accounted for roughly 10 percent of Japan's entire box office revenue that year. That made it the second-largest gross ever for a Japanese film, behind only Spirited Away. It was the fourth-largest gross for any film shown in Japan, behind only Titanic and Frozen. It became the first anime film not directed by Hayao Miyazaki to reach that scale of earnings in Japan. It also remained the country's highest-grossing film of all time until Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba , The Movie: Mugen Train overtook it in 2020.

  Beyond Japan, Your Name became the highest-grossing Japanese film in China on the 17th of December, 2016, and the highest-grossing traditionally animated film the country had ever seen. On its opening day there, the film screened in more than 7,000 Chinese theaters, drawing over 2.77 million viewers across roughly 66,000 screenings. It held the record for the highest-grossing non-Hollywood foreign film in China. Two Indian films, Dangal and Secret Superstar, surpassed it in May 2017 and February 2018. A 2024 re-release, on the 19th of July, still earned over 5.3 million US dollars on its opening day alone.

  In South Korea, the film opened at number one with 1.18 million admissions in its first five days, the first Japanese film to top the chart there since Howl's Moving Castle. It eventually drew 3.81 million admissions in South Korea, remaining the country's highest-grossing anime film for years. The First Slam Dunk and Suzume, Shinkai's next film after Weathering with You, surpassed it in 2023.

  On Rotten Tomatoes, 98 percent of 119 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average score of 8.2 out of 10. Metacritic scored it 81 out of 100 across 26 critics, indicating what it called universal acclaim. Mark Schilling of The Japan Times rated it 4 out of 5, praising its "blend of gorgeous, realistic detail and emotionally grounded fantasy." In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it "a wistfully lovely Japanese tale," while David Sims of The Atlantic described it as "a dazzling new work of anime."

  Shinkai himself considered the film incomplete. He explained that animation director Masashi Ando "wanted to keep working" but had to stop for lack of money. "For me, it's incomplete, unbalanced," Shinkai said. "The plot is fine but the film is not at all perfect. Two years was not enough."

  The film won Best Animated Feature at the 2016 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, the 49th Sitges Film Festival, and the 71st Mainichi Film Awards, and was nominated for the Japan Academy Film Prize for Animation of the Year.

  None of those honors, though, matched what was still ahead: a wave of adaptations, cultural cameos, and one very unusual live-action remake still years from completion.

• 8. After The Credits

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  A month before the film reached theaters, Kadokawa published Shinkai's own light-novel adaptation in Japan on the 18th of June, 2016, running 262 pages. By September that year it had sold roughly 1,029,000 copies alongside an official visual guide. The novel alone has since sold more than 1.3 million copies, and the novel and guide together have passed 2.5 million. A companion volume, Your Name. Another Side: Earthbound, followed on the 1st of August, 2016, retelling the same events from the perspective of Mitsuha's friends and family, written by Shinkai with Arata Kanoh.

  Culturally, the film's reach kept expanding. Nekotofu, creator of the manga Onimai: I'm Now Your Sister!, has named Your Name as a direct influence on that series. According to Crunchyroll, its success helped push non-Ghibli anime films into the mainstream in Japan and changed how such films were both produced and marketed. It has since been referenced or parodied across pop culture, from an episode of Little Witch Academia to a promotional tie-in for the game Fortnite. In 2025 it placed 168th in The New York Times' reader-voted list of the 100 best movies of the twenty-first century.

  The one adaptation still unfinished is a live-action remake, announced by J. J. Abrams and Eric Heisserer on the 27th of September, 2017, for Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot. Its writer and director have changed twice since then, from Marc Webb to Lee Isaac Chung to Carlos López Estrada. Estrada took over writing and directing on the 31st of October, 2022. As of October 2023, according to producer Genki Kawamura, the remake was still in production. It had been delayed for years by the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, its release date still unknown.