Kimi no Na wa (or Your Name in English) finally came out in German cinemas. Just yesterday I watched it at the local Cinemaxx and I thought about sharing my opinion. (Yeah, I know it's over a year old now and everyone has probably already seen it but you know, it's Germany, it takes some time to adapt these things).
Again, sorry for the bad photo, not my specialty xD
Summary
Mitsuha Miyamizu, a high school girl, yearns to live the life of a boy in the bustling city of Tokyo—a dream that stands in stark contrast to her present life in the countryside. Meanwhile in the city, Taki Tachibana lives a busy life as a high school student while juggling his part-time job and hopes for a future in architecture.
One day, Mitsuha awakens in a room that is not her own and suddenly finds herself living the dream life in Tokyo—but in Taki's body! Elsewhere, Taki finds himself living Mitsuha's life in the humble countryside. In pursuit of an answer to this strange phenomenon, they begin to search for one another.
Kimi no Na wa. revolves around Mitsuha and Taki's actions, which begin to have a dramatic impact on each other's lives, weaving them into a fabric held together by fate and circumstance.
(Source: MyAnimeList.net)
My Opinion
I know, this is not the typical structure of a review but I'm not very good at analyzing certain parts of a movie, especially if I'm only able to watch it once and since I rate anime purely by enjoyment it doesn't matter that much for me. So I'm just going to share my first impressions with you:
At first, I really really liked this movie but nonetheless I don't quite understand why it's rated that well (at the moment of writing this it's at 9.22/10 on MyAnimeList.net). I know it has a heartwarming story with nice humor and of course a happy end but could you explain to me what makes it so unique that it stands out that much? Don't get me wrong, as I already said, I love the movie and apparently a great part of German anime fans did, too, but 9.22?
Okay, back to topic. The visuals were amazing, you could see that they really tried to emphasize the backgrounds and other ambient effects to create the right mood and the animation was smooth an beautiful.
In terms of sound design they did a great job at attuning the soundeffects with the visuals and the title song during the montages fit perfectly in my opinion. The only thing I didn't really like was the high pitched "pling" when the scene switched to the other character (if you've seen the movie, I hope you know what I mean but I don't want to spoil anything to the people that are still planning on watching Kimi no Na wa). Apart from that, I can't really give any opinion on the voice actors since I watched the German dub (I didn't have time when it aired on Japanese with subtitles) but I can say that the German cast did quite the great job.
Do I recommend this?
If you've read this post you should already know but for everyone who didn't want to read the above text: You bet I do!
I really like stories like this which is probably not quite common for a boy (but what do I know?) and when sound and visuals matched perfectly the movie even managed to send shivers down my spine. For everyone who hasn't watched Kimi no Na wa yet and has the opportunity to: Go do it!
Thank you for reading my little opinion post. How did you like Kimi no Na wa? And what other anime movies could you recommend? I'd really like to know since I just started watching anime actively about one and a half years ago so there's still a long way to go. If you'd like you could even check out my MyAnimeList Profile.