And it's not just their anatomies they've exchanged, or even the identities-in-progress each has managed to cobble together at such a tender age. In the charming and soulful Japanese anime Your Name, two teenagers who have never met wake up rattled to discover that they have switched bodies in their sleep, or more precisely their dreams. I felt encouraged by other directors because I'm going in the right direction.The Mirror Has Two Faces: Taki finds himself in the body of Mitsuha in writer/director Makoto Shinkai's Your Name. So I thought it confirms that what I'm making now is now, it's current. And there's another movie, from Korea, called The Beauty Inside, which is about a character who wakes up in the morning as a different person every day. I saw it while I was making this film, and I found quite a few similarities. So the important thing about this is that it's a fictional story, but I didn't want it to be unrealistic, so I didn't want teenagers to create some sort of miracle I really wanted them to go to the adults and try to think of what to do, which is more realistic I think. In this movie, the comet comes and what the teenagers would do is go to the mayors and get the adults involved, because they can't really do much. It's hard to tell but realistically speaking, there's not much that teenagers can do. How do you think real-life teens in Japan would react if they knew destruction was coming? It's not like people are thinking about it everyday, but I think people are aware of how vulnerable our land is, so I wanted to create some sort of miracle it's not just about sadness. There's a line in the film - "you never know when Tokyo will go" - and I think people are conscious about that. That incident really reminded us how vulnerable Japan is. Yes, and without that big earthquake in 2011, this story would have been completely different. Was that threat of destruction something you took from real life in Japan? There's the idea of a natural disaster looming. I get people from abroad coming to Japan saying, "I love your film and that's why we came here." So that's great. So it's nice to find hidden gems and I think that will cheer people up and I want people in Tokyo to feel that Tokyo is beautiful, that would make me feel proud. Tokyo is beautiful and yet you can find lots of negative stuff - packed trains, really busy places. I simply wanted to show: this is where I live and it's beautiful. How important was that for you, working from real-life locations? I'm in control.įans have even visited the real-life locations that the film was modeled on. There are things that are common with live-action movies - shots of hands and feet and everything else - but I don't find it particularly more difficult because I'm drawing the characters. So if you want to tell stories genuinely, I think animation is one of the best formats. We create characters for the film, so the characters don't play other characters. But with live-action movies it's the director's creation, but half the film is influenced by the actors whereas in animation, everything is mine. I don't think one is more difficult than the other they're just two different things. Do you think it's harder to capture the nuances of coming-of-age in animation versus live-action?
Body swap anime movie#
It was like seeing a teen movie done as an animation. So I wanted to surprise people, because people think, 'oh it's about a boy-girl body swap', when the film isn't just about that. But the aspect is only a part of the film it begins as that but it doesn't end like that. The boy-girl swap theme is quite common in Japanese fictional stories - films, mangas - and actually about a thousand years ago, there was a story about this man-woman body swap. Where did you get the idea for this boy-girl swap story? When i-D sat down with Shinkai, we asked him why he thinks the film has struck a chord in Japan, how the country's deadly 2011 earthquake shaped its story, and how it feels to be hailed as 'the heir to Hayao Miyazaki'. And it's hard to think of anything quite like it. It's a teen body-swap comedy that's part love story, part disaster movie. But why is this happening to them? Does it have something to do with the enormous comet passing over Japan, perhaps?Īs Makoto Shinkai's high-concept anime unspools, a will-they-won't-they romance emerges against a backdrop of a looming eco-disaster. They swap bodies a bunch of times and have fun toying with each other's lives, organizing dates, leaving text messages. The boy, trapped in his new female body, peers down at his breasts in disbelief. The story sees two teens - a boy from Tokyo, a girl from the sticks - inexplicably swap bodies overnight. That's exactly where Japanese anime Your Name - the number-one movie in Japan for nine weeks running - dares to go.