Makoto Shinkai animation Your Name tops Japanese box office for the ninth successive weekend.
Last weekend, 22-23 October, the Toho release made $4.56 million, bringing its cumulative total to $157 million. The film is the 9th highest earning film ever released in Japan including foreign films.
Your Name is the first Japanese animated film to be chosen for the official competition at the BFI London Film Festival. The film also received a special screening at Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival. Your Name is scheduled for international release in 85 countries.
The plot revolves around the gender swapping between senior high school boy Taki Tachibana and senior high school girl Mitsuha Miyamizu. The two have never met, but their fates become intertwined by the one-in-a-thousand-years fall of a comet. A number of real-life locations are shown in the animated film, including Shinkai’s hometown in Nagano prefecture in central Japan, its neighboring prefecture Gifu and Tokyo. The film is praised for its beautiful cinematography and its use of light.
Discussing his film, Shinkai who has been hailed as the new Miyazaki said, “there are quite a lot of them who feel distressed if their lives only revolve around school or home, which is why they turn to reading manga or novels and playing (video) games. I want to create for the young generation who earnestly need such stories”.
