That Makoto Shinkai, a director who had earned considerable praise for films such as 5cm a Second, Voices of a Distant Star, and Garden of Words, but had never attained widespread popular success, could deliver the fourth-highest-grossing film in the history of Japan (and the highest grossing Japanese language film worldwide) appears surprising. Kimi no Na Wa, translated in English as Your Name, is one such film.
Every now and then, there comes a transcendent piece of cinema that film that not only surpasses expectations, but makes the entire idea of having expectations appear as ludicrous as an ant attempting to understanding the secrets of galaxies located millions of light-years away that not only captures the zeitgeist but coats it in a benevolent luster that is enough to exorcise the demons of the age and enhance the legacy of the era that emanates enough lambent character focus and combusting narrative thrust and bounteous lyrical detail to reduce a critic’s attempts to pin down its essence, its spirit, to mere puerile sophistry that marks itself as an aching work transforming the mundane banalities of everyday life and the basic truisms of a specific stage and element of life into a phantasmagorical orchestra of music and magic that the most ordinary filmgoer can realize is more than the sum of its plot and its characters’ motivations that unites audiences and critics alike into a cacophony of rapture.
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