Your Name (Kimi no na wa)

Just as director Makoto Shinkai’s latest film, Weathering with You, debuts at festivals and in theaters around the world, MoMI brings his 2016 hit animated fantasy Your Name back to the big screen. Set on the eve of a rare cosmic event—the passing of a once-in-a-lifetime comet—two high school students, strangers living separate lives, suddenly switch places. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body and he, hers. Communicating through scribbled notes and phone diaries, they muddle through each other’s lives in both frustrating and hilarious ways. What opens as a teen romance expands into a mystery touching upon Shinto rites and the supernatural. At its core, Your Name captures the longing for lost places and people, underscored by Shinkai’s gorgeous hyper-realist style indelibly etching Tokyo’s cityscape and the beauty of rural Gifu prefecture—and the ubiquitous trains threading through them—into the viewer’s memory. Featuring music by the Japanese band RADWIMPS. View trailer. Recommended for ages 9+ (In Japanese with English subtitles)

“Your Name… is stranger and more intimate than a love story, and has truly profound ideas about the places we live and the experiences we grow up with being visceral things that live in our bodies. But it’s also a full-throated Teen Movie, with an ecstatic J-Rock score to match, and all the starry-eyed longing the genre allows.”—Emily Yoshida, “Best Films of 2017,” Vulture