Review: Your Name (Kimi no na Wa) is a beautiful, out-of-body experience.

Revisiting themes of longing and separation that became his signature in films such as 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007) and The Garden of Words (2013), Shinkai’s fifth feature has confirmed the writer-director as a major talent, duly dubbed “the new Miyazaki”.

Scenes of astral magic and natural disaster (an understandable preoccupation of Japanese cinema) lend a degree of spectacle that would put many live-action blockbusters to shame, while a hallucinogenic diversion into chalk pastel wonderment will transport even the most sceptical viewer to another realm.

Throughout, Shinkai juxtaposes male and female, town and country, science and superstition, past and present. But it’s in the twilight twinkling of kataware doki, when night and day meet and worlds old and new collide, that the real heart of this story lies. Like Chris Marker’s pioneering sci-fi La jetée (which inspired Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys), Your Name spirals elegantly towards a point where beginnings and ends become indistinguishable, but does so more in the manner of a melancholy coming-of-age comedy than an abstract arthouse experiment.

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