Your Name (2016) (Live at the British Film Institute)

Episode 99 is a special instalment of the podcast recorded Live at the British Film Institute in London back in May 2022, with Chris and Alex joined by an audience of anime fans to discuss Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) as part of the BFI’s Anime season. Featuring an introduction to the artistry and creativity of anime, an examination of Your Name’s temporal loops and overlapping rhythms, and a lively Q&A with those gathered at the BFI’s Reuben Library, this episode features a conversation about writer/director Makoto Shinkai’s romantic animated fantasy - and its pleasures of longing - as protagonists Taki and Mitsuha magically and unexpectedly swap bodies across time and space. Topics for this episode include Japanese anime as a shifting and unstable category of animation, as well as both a local and global cultural phenomenon; the liminal spaces of Your Name as a film invested in temporality and mobility; non-Western traditions of fantasy storytelling and their desire to fracture logic and rationality; the cyclical/linear rhythms that structure the movement of Taki and Mitsuha across temporal (and historical) boundaries; the spectral quality to Shinkai’s handling of characters that ‘haunt’ multiple spaces; and what Your Name has to say about national culture in its two competing - and highly gendered - visions of Japan. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**