JJ Abrams is set to create a live-action adaptation of the Japanese anime Your Name.
The Independent reports that the Star Wars director is teaming up with Paramount Pictures through his Bad Robot production company to bring Your Name to life.
Makoto Shinkai’s highly successful original anime film had broken records in the Japanese box office upon its release and even beat Spirited Away as the highest grossing anime film of all time.
At the start of the year, fans were outraged that Your Namedenied an Oscar nomination was despite being the highest grossing anime of all time.
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. Shinkai had explained that the film was inspired by the 2011 Japan earthquake.
In a statement regarding the remake, Shinkai said, “Your Name is a film created with the innate imaginations of a Japanese team and put together in a domestic medium. When such a work is imbued with Hollywood filmmaking, we may see new possibilities that we had been completely unaware of. I am looking forward to the live-action film with excited anticipation.”
“Just like in the film it feels like a dream,” Genki Kawamura, producer of both the original and remake added. “Mr. Abrams and his team have captivated audiences in their masterful reinvention of known properties. And Mitsuha and Taki have found a perfect narrator, Mr. Heisserer, to tell their sci-fi infused love story which gave the film such drive.”
“The meetings so far have been creatively stimulating with fantastic ideas that no doubt will make for a great movie. I am greatly honored to work with these incredible creators in bringing to audiences the Hollywood live action version of Your Name.”
