The first time we saw Your Name (2016), we framed it in our head as a movie about a gender-bending body swap. This is a perfectly understandable thing for us to have done—of course a closeted trans youth would fixate on the trans-gender* intimacy of the movie's premise. The genders of the lead characters are important, of course; the trappings of binary gender, its restrictions and liberties, play a key role in their arcs. The swap is the basis for the film's romance, but it also provides a throughline for the coming of age aspects of the narrative, placing emphasis on the differences in the characters' bodies. So it's not inaccurate to say that Your Name is a body-swap movie with a gendered element. Still, we can't, in good faith, say that we think Your Name has much interesting to say about gender.
What the movie does have is a romance with a strong relationship dynamic. The body-swapping main characters, Taki and Mitsuha, necessarily don't share a huge amount of screentime, or even direct dialogue. A large portion of their relationship is developed in a sort of montage, where they exchange notes to break down the rules of being each other, come to compromises, and face the consequences of their counterpart's decisions. This may sound underdeveloped, trite, and shallow, but in practice, the tangible influence they have over each other's lives is compelling. There is a definite sense that they are better for having connected. Each is changed through learning how to be the other.
About halfway through, however, the movie shifts gears. Taki and Mitsuha stop switching bodies, and Taki can't get in touch with her at all. Now the movie is a melancholy cross-country mystery, and then it's a time-bending soft science fiction. It's a disaster movie—well, more accurately, it's a movie about averting a disaster. The relationship between Taki and Mitsuha has cataclysmic stakes riding on it. But everything does when you're a teenager.
If Your Name has a true flaw, perhaps it's a lack of restraint. One running gag involves Taki, upon registering he is in a woman's body, groping his own (Mitsuha's) breasts. An unremarkable bit, but really, who wouldn't? The joke is subverted, briefly, when Taki switches with Mitsuha for the final time: he appears to move to grope, but then wraps her body in a self-hug. This is a genuinely beautiful and sweet moment. Then a hard cut reveals that Taki does feel up Mitsuha's breasts after all. One supposes Shinkai couldn't help making the joke once more.
In a similar vein, there is perhaps a criticism to be made that the film lingers too long on the sentimental elements of its final act, that it's excessively saccharine. Perhaps you could make this criticism. If you do, we'll read it once we're done wiping away our tears.
This is one of our favorite movies, and we were very grateful for the opportunity to see it in theaters again.
* Not as cool as transgender, but close enough.