I’m one of those strange holdouts you may have heard about. I still have a Netflix DVD subscription.
The red envelopes that came in the mail to everyone ten years ago never stopped coming to my door. I’m not sure why I’ve held onto my subscription. Over the past five years I’ve barely watched any DVDs from Netflix, even though I have a one disc out at a time, unlimited subscription (meaning: I can only have one DVD at home at a time, but I can borrow as many DVDs as I can quickly turn around in the mail).
I’d been holding on to one DVD for the longest time. The unopened red envelope sat in various places in my home as I moved it around, swearing to myself that I would get around to watching that movie sometime soon.
What movie would make me keep that red envelope instead of sending it back to Netflix unopened and unwatched?
The movie in that red envelope so long unopened was Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name (Kimi no Na wa), the award-winning anime film that made a splash back in 2016 and was Shinkai’s first genuine commercial success.
I just couldn’t return it unwatched. But I never seemed to have the time to sit down and watch it.
Besides, I really did want to see it. Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star, his 2002 short film, is still on my all-time top ten list of anime movies. His style is unique (... maybe too unique... more on that below). I was torn between just mailing it back and deciding to watch it, maybe some weekend soon… and so it went.
About six weeks ago, I received a polite email from Netflix stating that I had had my present DVD at home for some time, and inquiring as to the status of the disc. Was it perhaps lost? If so, no worries, I should just let them know by pressing on a link in the email that was designed to look like a button. (The link had the words “Yes, It’s Lost” on it.)
I finally decided - this was it. I was going to sit down and watch Your Name if it killed me.
So I did, and I’ll discuss the film below, but to finish up with Netflix… When I logged in to my Netflix account to see what was in my queue, I saw the date that Your Name had been sent to me.
I’d had the disc at home for TWO AND A HALF YEARS.
The monthly fee for the one-disc-out-at-a-time subscription has got to be the lowest tier they have, so it wasn’t like I was out a lot of money. Even so, over 2-1/2 years the total was enough to have bought around eight Blu-ray discs of the movie and still have had money left over.
Also, I checked Amazon Prime. Your Name is available free for streaming, meaning that I could’ve thrown the Netflix disc off a cliff anytime in the last two-and-a-half years, hit “Yes, It’s Lost” and watched it on Amazon Prime.
Not that I would do that. But somehow, it’s ironic and fitting that it was a Makoto Shinkai film that sat in my home unwatched for that length of time, because time is almost a discrete character in his works. When a Shinkai movie starts and you enter into the controlled atmosphere of his setting and story, your sense of time changes to the point that you can literally feel disoriented.
Voices of a Distant Star is about two close teenage friends, a boy and a girl. Mikako, the girl, is chosen to participate in a mission that will send her deep into space. As time passes, the boy, Noboru, ages normally but Mikako does not, and her text messages take years to reach him.
In the exhilarating climax, Mikako, her ship under attack, thinks of Noboru. She is still a teenager but Noboru is now in his twenties. The extreme distances of time and space that separate the two give the characters and their relationship a heightened vulnerability. Though only 25 minutes long, the film leaves a deep emotional impression.
And the most memorable scene in 5 Centimeters per Second is when the main character, Takaki, a teenage boy, is traveling to meet with his friend Akari in a faraway town. His train gets stuck in a snowdrift, and as the hours go by, Takaki gives in to a sense of quiet despair. Akari was going to meet him at the train station, but there was no way she would stay four or five hours beyond the time they were to meet…
Finally the train moves again, and as they arrive at the station, a miracle occurs. Despite all odds and common-sense conclusions, Akari is there waiting for him.
So when you watch a Shinkai film, you enter a time-space continuum that could be called Shinkai Time. The way each of us experiences the passage of time is personal, but when you watch a Shinkai movie, he forces you to reexamine how you see time, to see it how he sees it.
When Your Name came out in 2016, some reviewers commented on how commercially driven it felt when compared with Shinkai’s earlier works. Since there’s nothing wrong with wanting commercial success, I wasn’t sure what the critics were getting at. Now that I’ve seen the movie, however, I think I know.
Your Name has an immediately understandable premise. Two high school students, Taki, a boy in Tokyo, and Mitsuha, a girl in a remote town in Japan’s countryside, begin to switch bodies at random and not of their own volition. At first they have no idea what is happening, but over time, once they become accustomed to it, they start leaving each other notes so that each can maintain their life with a semblance of order.
For the first hour, you are firmly in the realm of Shinkai Time. The story moves at a snail’s pace as the two teenagers get used to their opposite-sex bodies, hide what’s going on from their family and friends, and start secretly communicating with each other through the note system.
The big turning point comes when the body-switching suddenly stops. And here is where the Shinkai Time continuum breaks down a little.
Before Your Name, Shinkai’s use of time in his movies made you, the audience, think about it. The plasticity of it, the way it moves too fast when you want it to linger or how agonizingly slow it goes when you want it to speed up. The relation of time to events in our lives and our inner landscapes suddenly becomes important - not like it isn’t in real life too, but seeing how time affects the characters in a Shinkai movie brings it home in a real way. Time is passing in our lives as well. How are we making use of the finite time we each have?
Once the body-switching stops, Taki and Mitsuha try to reach each other to find out what’s going on. Taki takes a train to the countryside, only to discover that Mitsuha was from a small town that was destroyed by a meteor several years before.
So was she a ghost from the past that was somehow able to communicate with him? Or could she still be alive, despite the fact that her name is listed as being among the dead from the town?
The final hour of Your Name, in contrast with the slow first hour, is a blizzard of activity. Taki wakes up in Mitsuha’s body on the day of the meteor strike and enlists others to evacuate the small town, while Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body.
The moment that threw me off was when the two teenagers in their switched bodies go to a mountaintop to try to meet with each other, but are unable to since one is living in the present and the other lives in the past.
And yet somehow...
I’d been following along pretty well until then, but after this, I got confused. So when I finished the movie, I went to where everyone goes when they didn’t understand a movie’s plot: Wikipedia.
According to the Wikipedia summary, despite being in different time periods, the two are able to meet due to kataware-doki or “magic hour,” those moments at sunset when supernatural occurrences are said to be possible.
Kataware-doki is an old Japanese myth/concept, so we in the western audience would be unlikely to guess what caused them to be able to meet each other. It was a lovely moment in the film and I don’t begrudge it, but it was also the moment that took me out of the story.
The town is evacuated and Mitsuha survives to meet Taki again years later in Tokyo. So - and I’m guessing here - that must mean that the two of them somehow managed to change history, since nobody ends up dying when the meteor strikes(?). The plot is muddled in the scenes that follow their meeting on the mountaintop - either that, or it required more concentration than I felt like giving it in order to understand it while I was watching the movie.
What made Shinkai classics like Voices of a Distant Star so powerful was the inexorable nature of time. You, as a mere human, couldn’t control it. Time took loved ones far away, beyond your reach... or sometimes it miraculously brought you together when you’d given up expecting it, but in any case, it wasn’t something you had any agency over.
In his earlier films, getting caught up in Shinkai Time could be frustrating but the emotional payoffs were greater. To be honest, while Your Name was a nice movie, it didn’t affect me emotionally at all. I think it was Shinkai’s first huge commercial success because of its unequivocal happy ending and because it had less weirdness than his other films. But I missed that weirdness, and the slow build of scenes on their way to... who knew what would happen next? That was a hallmark of early Shinkai and we’ll never see it again, because I’m guessing that Your Name grossing $380 million worldwide is going to set his path as a filmmaker going forward.
So if Your Name made you curious about Shinkai, see his earlier works - and enjoy your sojourn in Shinkai Time. :-)
