8 Harsh Realities Of Rewatching Your Name, 10 Years Later

The wonderful anime movie Your Name, or Kimi No Na Wa, turns 10 this year, and as we reflect on it, some harsh realities emerge that are hard to ignore. Some anime movies are so prolific that they gain international appreciation, rather than remaining niche. Your Name is one such film.

The movie won Most Popular Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Music Score at the 2017 Japanese Academy Awards. Additionally, it was nominated for Best Animated Film at both the Saturn Awards and the Satellite Awards.

Like many others who watched Your Name, the film lands among my favorite anime romances. I’ve watched it many times. That said, some harsh realities emerge when revisiting it a decade after its initial release. These eight things stand out nowadays.

Taki Feeling Up Mitsuha’s Body Is A Little Creepy

When I first watched Your Name, I was uncomfortable by the fact that Taki kept feeling up Mitsuha’s breasts. That being said, I just wrote it off as “boys being boys” and boys not being able to control themselves.

However, ten years later, I and probably many other viewers have deconstructed the idea that boys and men shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. It not only sends the wrong message to girls and women to dismiss the creepiness, but it also gives boys and men too little credit to say that they’re incapable of controlling themselves.

Taki knows it’s wrong to feel up Mitsuha. He even says that when he’s inside her body. However, that doesn’t stop him from not only doing it but lying about it when he meets Mitsuha. In retrospect, we can enjoy My Name and still acknowledge that his behavior was creepy. Both things can be true.

Your Name Doesn’t Clarify The Mechanics Of Body Swapping

Your Name is fantastic at getting the audience to invest in the story. It’s truly beautiful, and nothing takes away from the emotional impact. That being said, it has one big issue that becomes extremely distracting as soon as it’s pointed out. Your Name never bothers to clarify the mechanics of body swapping.

Our two main characters are not just having a Freaky Friday moment day after day. They are also moving through time and space, as Mitsuha and Taki are nowhere near each other in timeline or location. They stop swapping and then start again. Then, they find a way to force-swap bodies. Plus, they never really give a “why.”

The movie's events are so confusing that fans are constantly discussing them on Reddit. Ultimately, as unsatisfying as this answer might be, it’s best just to ignore the body-swapping mechanics altogether.

The Technology Doesn’t Make Sense For 2013 & 2016

Your Name plays fast and loose with technology. Both Mitsuha and Taki have what look like smartphones, and they use them for phone calls and notes. This is appropriate for the time period, and it’s good that they didn’t ignore technology completely. However, neither of them bothers to use the internet or social media when it would be helpful.

Taki could have taken a photo of his drawings, posted them on social media, and found the town's name and location within hours. Either Taki or Mitsuha could have searched for the other on Google or Facebook from their phones. Mitsuha could have connected with Taki online without taking a trip to Tokyo. Taki could have learned about the asteroid hitting much more quickly.

The movie also requires us to believe that Taki never heard about a giant asteroid wiping out a town in Japan online, which just feels unlikely. Plus, the scientific community can predict the likelihood of objects hitting Earth with pretty high accuracy. Ultimately, it feels like they ignored the glaring issue of technology just to move the story along.

The Bomb Plan In My Name Is Laughably Bad

The end of Your Name involves Taki (in Mitsuha’s body) and Mitsuha’s friends trying to evacuate the entire town using the town's alert system. However, the first step in that plan involves setting off a bomb at the sub-station. They never bother to consider the number of issues that could have arisen from the bomb.

The bomb could have killed someone. They’re lying when they say that the explosion started a wildfire, but they never considered that it could actually start a wildfire. They didn’t consider the damage that power loss could cause. They could have killed the town before the meteorite did. They basically just got lucky that nothing bad actually happened.

The only explanation for this laughably bad plan is the fact that it was created by a bunch of high schoolers. They might be smart, but the characters’ ages mean they don’t have the best foresight.

The Changes To The Past Don’t Impact The Future

Body swapping across space and time isn’t the only question mark when it comes to the mechanics in Your Name. The movie doesn’t seem to be in a causal loop; otherwise, they wouldn't be able to prevent the deaths of all the citizens in Itomori. The time travel back and forth should have rippling effects on the timeline.

Pretty much every time-travel movie has also proven that any small change to the past can alter the future in unpredictable and massive ways. One would think Taki’s entire reality would be changed by the fact that the citizens of Itomori survive.

The government would likely become more paranoid about the possibility of asteroids hitting, making that its focus. Tokyo would undoubtedly become a hub for this, as Japan's largest city. The country would have had to rehouse all the citizens. A natural disaster like that could have changed the economy for multiple years. The fact that there are almost zero recognizable impacts seems nearly impossible.

Taki Should Have Recognized Mitsuha

Rewatching Your Name recently, one thing really nagged at me. Taki and Mitsuha met three years before they started swapping bodies, at least in Taki’s timeline. He should have recognized Mitsuha from the moment he swapped places into her body.

However, he never mentions recognizing her, and he acts like she’s completely unfamiliar to him. There’s a good argument to be made that he simply forgot the face of a stranger he met once in passing three years ago. After all, they only interacted for a minute.

However, the sticking point is that he still wears the cord that she gave him around his wrist every day after three years. It’s even a visual cue that Taki is in his body, since Mitsuha never wears the red cord as a bracelet. If he still wears it three years later, the interaction was probably meaningful to him, so he should have remembered her.

The Townspeople Probably Wouldn’t Believe Mitsuha

The ending of Your Name is probably the weakest part of the entire movie, when it comes to logic. We’ve bought into the relationship between Mitsuha and Taki. We want Mitsuha to evade the meteorite so that Taki and Mitsuha can be together. Everything about the romance is compelling.

However, the ending requires Mistuha’s friends to believe her when she says she has been traveling back and forth between 2013 and 2016, switching bodies with a teen boy in Tokyo. It requires them to believe that she knows the future. It’s a ludicrous ask. It also requires her dad to believe that she somehow knows a meteorite will break apart and destroy the city.

None of the townspeople, including her friends and her father, should have believed what Mitsuha had to say about time traveling, let alone the incoming meteorite. She had zero proof. Her story (and Taki’s story when he’s in her body) sounds like the ravings of someone who has lost touch with reality.

Taki & Mitsuha Should Have Noticed The Three-Year Difference

As much as I love Your Name, the final harsh reality is a little less easy to write off than the others. Taki and Mitsuha spend quite some time switching back and forth between 2013 and 2016. It’s a long enough period that they develop a system of communication to fill each other in on the events of the previous day.

However, not once do they notice that they are in different years. Phones have dates on them. Calendars exist. Teachers write dates on the chalkboard. Students are often expected to write the date on their schoolwork. The Autumn festival is coming up, and it seems logical that someone would have mentioned the year at some point.

This completely disregards the fact that cars, phones, and other forms of technology changed significantly between 2013 and 2016. How on Earth did they not figure out that they were experiencing life three years apart? It’s completely inconceivable that Mitsuha and Taki think they are in the same year.

All these harsh realities considered, Your Name might not be the masterpiece anime movie it was once thought to be. That doesn’t change how enjoyable the film is, though.