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In short: it's incredible, and absolutely deserves all the praise it gets.
To go into more detail, it's far and away the best film Shinkai has made, and this is partly because it's in many ways the culmination of the themes and styles of a number of his past films. Most of all, it reminds me of The Place Promised In Our Early Days, which was his first attempt at a feature-length project. Not to say it's a bad film, but of all his main series of works it feels the least polished, with a great deal of ambition to it but without the experience to see that ambition to a successful conclusion. Place Promised tried to do a lot of things, and unfortunately I find it failed to build the kind of emotional investment that it needed to be great. Perhaps deliberately, in his earlier films there's a lot of work in the themes and visual emotion, which is carried well by his great directing and the always gorgeous environmental details.
In a sense, Your Name doesn't feel much like a Shinkai movie at all. Really, it reminds me a lot of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time by Mamoru Hosoda, my favourite anime film of all time. There's the immediate similarity in the time-travel romance side of the story, but more deeply than that, I feel like Your Name manages to combine the memorable, lively characters of Hosoda's films with the themes Shinkai typically uses. And Your Name is hardly a break from tradition in the latter: Shinkai just about always establishes the passage of time, and by extension age, as a central or at least closely peripheral theme; in Your Name, this is clearly more literal than with anything else he's done perhaps aside from Voices of a Distant Star. This works very well with 5 Centimetres Per Second, which uses its themes of ageing and longing as a bridge to the emotions of the viewer, in a sense conveying these empathetically through the characters. In contrast, in your name the focus is on the characters and their struggles, invoking emotion sympathetically: rather than aiming to have the viewer fill in the emotional shoes of the characters through feeling the same, the characters exist for themselves and their own narrative.
5 Centimetres Per Second is a film that makes my cry every single time I watch it, because it relates a lot of very personal pain. However, I prefer the driving emotion, the developing narrative, and the colourful and unique characters of Your Name when it comes to its value as a film and simply to watch and enjoy. Here, Shinkai manages to unite the well-known strength of his common themes and emotion with an excellent, character-driven story; the former is what makes 5 Centimetres Per Second so powerful, andthe latter makes The Girl Who Leapt Through Time so enjoyable and, shall we say, timeless.
And that, of course, is not to mention the fantastic quality of the animation itself: while not as precisely (and of course deliberately) photorealistic as Garden of Words, the backgrounds are both breathtaking and reinforce the thematic pillars of the story, and the designs of the characters manage to be expressive and still fit artistically into the gorgeous environments Shinkai is known for.
I'm very, very tempted to watch it again. It's a fantastic film, and I feel like a second viewing would highlight more of what made it as great as it is, rather than revealing flaws - something I found, at times, with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. I think I'll also have to be re-thinking what my favourite anime film is, but considering how incredibly excited I am by Your Name, I think that's it now. I absolutely am considering making a grave financial mistake and throwing some money on collectible goods. This in no small part because not only is the body of the film unreservedly great, the music is directed just right to smoothly enhance the film rather than overtake it or fall into the common pitfall of being simply underutilized.
If you watch just one of Makoto Shinkai's films, Your Name might as well be it.
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Originally Posted by Shrapnel
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