Why use "again" four times?
Because in Re:Zero, Emilia had died who knew how many times.
In Steins;Gate, Makise had also died more than once.
In Clannad, Nagisa had died as well.
And now, in Your Name., Mitsuha was dead too.
Up to that point, among all the anime Sora had produced in Japan, Voices of a Distant Star had left its heroine's fate ambiguous in the main feature, only revealing later that she had survived. In Natsume Yuujinchou, the female lead had already been dead for decades when the story began. And in the works that followed, one way or another, the heroines always seemed to experience death somewhere along the way.
"Kantoku Sora, you're practically a specialist in killing off female leads," Anri sighed.
With years of anime-watching experience behind her, and having already followed Sora's three previous masterpieces, Anri immediately understood what the core of Your Name. would become from this point forward.
Saving Mitsuha.
That was the prediction that surfaced in her mind almost instinctively, like a conditioned response born from the emotional trauma of surviving Sora's last three productions.
But most anime fans did not possess Anri's sharp ability to read a story. Even among those who had watched his earlier works, many were so immersed in the plot that, the moment the truth was revealed, all they felt was a suffocating sense of despair.
Who could have imagined that the body-swapping between the male and female leads had not been happening on the same timeline, but across a gap of three entire years?
On Taki's phone, the messages Mitsuha had left behind while occupying his body began to twist into unreadable code before automatically deleting themselves. Every trace of their exchanges, every fact proving that the two of them had once shared each other's lives, was being erased by causality itself.
The mood of the story grew heavy.
At that moment, Taki made the most important decision of all.
He had to find a way to switch bodies with Mitsuha one more time.
From there, the narrative became tense.
The lightness and humor of the film's first half vanished completely.
Following the clues hidden in Mitsuha's grandmother's words during the earlier exchanges, along with the information he had uncovered through research, Taki arrived at the place where Mitsuha had once prepared her kuchikamizake and left it inside a cave as an offering to the gods.
It was sake made from grains Mitsuha had personally chewed, fermented by the enzymes in her saliva. Because of that, the drink held a natural, almost intimate connection to the girl who had already died.
When Anri and the rest of the audience saw Taki drink it all in one go, sly, amused smiles spread across the theater.
Kantoku Sora really knows how to stage this kind of scene, Anri thought, silently giving him her approval. Even something like this, placed inside this kind of plot, somehow manages to make your heart skip.
The body-swapping ability passed down almost generation after generation through Mitsuha's maternal family, the uniqueness of her body, and the murals left behind by Itomori's ancient inhabitants, who had predicted the meteor strike centuries earlier, all gave the film a faintly mysterious aura.
Then the sound of a bell rang out.
Taki crossed time once again and woke up inside Mitsuha's body.
With tears in his eyes, he cried from joy, grateful that he still had a chance to save that girl.
Of course, even while crying, he did not forget to grope the chest of her body.
The next moment, the door opened. Mitsuha's younger sister stared at her sister's perverted behavior, her expression slowly turning into pure horror.
The theater burst into laughter.
Anri laughed so hard that tears ran down her face.
"Kantoku Sora, you're ridiculous… How do you even come up with a scene like this?"
"This movie is insane. The way it switches from comedy to tears and back again almost made me choke from laughing."
"Kantoku Sora, why don't you make a comedy for your next work?"
"Is there any chance Attack on Titan, which premieres in April, is also going to be this kind of comedy?"
The murmurs in the theater gradually faded.
This time, Taki, now inside Mitsuha's body, did not have to save only the girl he had fallen in love with.
He also had to save every person in Itomori, the town that had been struck by the meteor three years earlier, sacrificing nearly all of its residents.
"So it really is another time-related anime," Anri murmured, taking a deep breath, her eyes filled with expectation.
Whenever Sora's works touched on this kind of element, she immediately felt confident.
However, that final crossing brought about by the kuchikamizake also caused Mitsuha's memories to flow inevitably into Taki's mind.
It turned out that after one of their previous exchanges, Mitsuha had been unable to accept the thought of Taki going on a date with his upperclassman. Once she realized that, if the two of them truly confessed and things worked out, she would not be able to bear it, she boarded a train to Tokyo alone, heading into a metropolis of millions simply because she wanted to meet Taki face to face.
But there was one problem.
How could the Taki from three years earlier possibly know Mitsuha?
With her heart full of uncertainty, the girl crossed hundreds of kilometers alone and arrived in that vast city. Guided by the memories in her mind, she found the area near the boy's home.
And there, on that train, she saw the boy with whom she had swapped bodies again and again across time, the boy who had left deep traces in her life.
The first thing he said after raising his head was:
"Who are you?"
Those few words made Anri's heart ache.
What was this?
Kantoku Sora, were you really returning to that painful style of storytelling again?
"You… don't remember?" Mitsuha's expression looked as though it might collapse into tears at any moment.
But Taki, at that time, was still only a middle school student. How could he possibly know Mitsuha, the girl he would only begin swapping bodies with three years later, after entering high school?
This was the meeting Mitsuha had longed for more than anything. She had imagined that Taki, just as she liked him, might also hold at least a little affection for her. She had imagined that, in the middle of that endless crowd, he would recognize her at first glance.
But no.
After knowing each other for so long, after occupying each other's bodies so many times, the boy did not even know who she was. He did not even know what she looked like.
Anri's eyes reddened before she realized it.
She had always been quick to cry, and that scene brought her to the edge of tears.
"I'm sorry." With a sorrowful expression, Mitsuha apologized to the male lead who did not know her.
The crowded train. Mitsuha, crushed by sadness. Taki, believing he had just encountered a strange older girl.
Behind it all, the instrumental score flowed softly and beautifully, wrapping the scene in a tenderness that almost hurt.
It was the bitterness of love. The scent of youth.
A kind of emotion Anri had never felt from any other anime before began to spill out from the screen.
Beautiful, romantic, cruel - and yet it made her desperately want to see what would happen next.
In the end, swept along by the crowd, Mitsuha only managed to give her hair ribbon to Taki, who understood nothing.
And Taki turned the ribbon he had received from that strange girl into an ornament tied around his wrist, wearing it for three whole years.
So that was why the camera had given so many close-ups to the heroine's ribbon and the protagonist's wristband.
They were the same object, serving different purposes at different points in time.
They were the same thread.
The scene shifted again.
Taki, now remembering everything, saw his journey through the kuchikamizake body-swap come to an end.
But he had not yet reached the night of the meteor's fall. He had not yet saved Mitsuha.
Time moved toward twilight.
According to the explanation given earlier in the story, that moment had another name: kataware-doki, the hour of encountering the strange and unseen.
A brief instant when time became distorted. Things and people that should never meet could, for a moment, cross the same space.
There was no need to debate the logic of it. It was simply a rule of that world.
Just like Return by Death in Re:Zero, the phone microwave time machine in Steins;Gate, or the orbs of light in Clannad.
If someone watched anime while trying to prove whether every single detail was scientifically sound, they could spend their entire life without finding a single work they were able to enjoy.
At the summit of the mountain surrounding Itomori, at the edge of the crater, Taki stood beneath the setting sun. On the other side of time, Mitsuha, three years in the past, had learned during her final exchange that she and everyone in the town would die that very night.
The two of them could not see each other.
But upon that ring at the mountain's peak, they could feel each other's presence.
And so they began to search.
Once again, the screen presented an image so beautiful it could have been used as a wallpaper.
"Mitsuha!"
"Taki!"
They felt each other. They heard each other calling. But they still could not see the person standing before them.
Guided only by their voices, they walked around the circle at the top of the mountain, drawing closer little by little.
Until, at a certain point of intersection, both of them reached out.
And across three years of space and time, their hands touched.
The exact moment of kataware-doki had arrived.
At that instant, Taki from three years in the future and Mitsuha from three years in the past stood face to face beneath the twilight, under the vast, endless sky.
Seeing that scene, Anri nearly cried.
Kantoku Sora truly understood how to build atmosphere.
When it came to Makoto Shinkai's works, one could say the plots were not always perfect or rigorous enough. One could say some of the rules had flaws, or that certain editing choices made the story a little difficult to understand.
But there was one thing no one could deny: that renowned Japanese Kantoku possessed extraordinary aesthetic sensitivity when it came to backgrounds and visual direction.
In Your Name., produced by Sora, that aspect in particular had been recreated perfectly. At least in this regard, he had fully brought out the style of the work he remembered from his previous life.
The boy and the girl, separated by three years, had crossed time again and again. They had swapped bodies, learned about each other, formed a bond, and come to recognize each other's existence.
And then they arrived at this moment.
Mitsuha, who three years earlier had already been destined to die, and Taki, who three years later was trying to change that fate through a crossing of time.
For the first time, they met face to face.
That indescribable romance, built through both story and image, struck every viewer in the theater like a silent and devastating wave.
patre0n ImmortalEmperor