Your Name

Your Name (Japanese: 君の名は。 Hepburn: Kimi no Na wa.) is a 2016 Japanese anime film
written and directed by Makoto Shinkai. Based on his novel of the same name published a month before the film's premiere, Your Name tells the story of a high school girl in rural Japan and a high school boy in Tokyo who swap bodies.

Your Name was animated by CoMix Wave Films, and distributed by Toho. It premiered at the Anime Expo 2016 convention in Los Angeles, California on July 3, 2016, and in Japan on August 26, 2016. It received critical acclaim for its animation and emotional impact, and was also a major commercial success, becoming the fourth highest-grossing film of all time in Japan, the 7th-highest grossing traditionally animated film and the highest-grossing anime film worldwide, with a total gross of more than $353 million.

Plot

Mitsuha, a high school girl living in Japan's mountainous Hida region, is bored of country life and wishes she were a handsome Tokyo boy. With her grandmother and younger sister, she makes kuchikamizake sake.

Mitsuha begins switching bodies intermittently with Taki, a high school boy living in Tokyo. Their memories of each other fade quickly, like dreams. They realize the experiences are real when their friends and family tell them they have acted strangely recently. They begin to communicate by leaving notes in Mitsuha's notebook and memos on Taki's phone and intervene in each other's lives. Mitsuha helps Taki develop a relationship with his coworker Miki, while Taki helps Mitsuha become popular in school. As Taki leaves Mitsuha's kuchikamizake as an offering in the family tomb on a mountaintop outside the town, Mitsuha tells Taki about a comet expected to pass Earth on the day of her town's festival.

One day, Taki wakes up back in his body. After an unsuccessful date with Miki, he tries to contact Mitsuha but fails, and the body switching ends. He decides to visit her hometown but does not know its name and his memories of it are fading. A restaurant owner in Hida recognizes the town from Taki's sketch and tells him it was destroyed by a fragment of the comet. Taki finds Mitsuha's name in the records of fatalities and discovers the date of the disaster. He realizes that their timelines were separated by three years.

Taki goes to Mitsuha's family shrine to drink her kuchikamizake, hoping to reconnect with her body before the comet strikes. He sees fragments of Mitsuha's past and learns that her father left the family after his wife died and that Mitsuha, having fallen in love with Taki, went to visit him the day before the comet struck. She met his younger self, giving him her name and ribbon. He wakes in her body on the morning of the festival and reveals his identity to Mitsuha's grandmother; she tells him the body switching is part of the Miyamizu family history caused by the kuchikamizake. He convinces Mitsuha's friends Tessie and Saya to help him evacuate the village but realizes that Mitsuha might be in his body at the shrine and goes back to the mountain.

Mitsuha wakes up in Taki's body at the shrine, and although they sense each other's presence on the mountain, she and Taki are separated by time. They realize it is twilight, travel back to their own bodies and finally meet. As they return to their respective timelines, they attempt to write each other's names on their hands so they remember each other, but Mitsuha disappears before she can write hers.

As Mitsuha races back to town, their memories of each other start to fade. Tessie tells Mitsuha to convince her estranged father, the mayor of Itomori, to evacuate the town. Running to his father's office, Mitsuha realizes that Taki wrote "I love you" on her hand instead of his name. She confronts her father and convinces him to evacuate the town. The comet piece crashes to Earth, destroying Itomori, but most of its inhabitants survive.

Five years later, Taki has graduated from university and is searching for a job, but senses he is missing something important. He recognizes Tessie and Saya in a Tokyo restaurant, now engaged, but cannot identify them. One day, Taki and Mitsuha recognize each other when their trains draw parallel. They disembark and search for one another, finally meeting on a staircase. Feeling as though they have met before, they ask for each other's name.