Big and melodramatic in all the best ways, with absolutely jaw-dropping animation.

I am probably one of the biggest defenders of the genre of melodrama I know. It’s easy to dismiss big emotions and tugging heartstrings as “cheap”, “manipulative”, or any other such long-overused buzzword, but I feel like those sentiments belie a kind of cowardice when it comes to honestly engaging with a piece of media. After all, why come to art in the first place if not for its ability to speak to our emotions? To help us make sense of them? To give us catharsis? To give us release, or closure, or an escape, or understanding? Melodrama is the most direct expression of art’s intended purpose there is, and at its best, it can result in some of the most soaring, rejuvinating works of art out there. You can keep your cynical Nolan films and bloviating Snyder films; give me Jun Maeda and a carton of tissues any day of the week. These are the works that speak the loudest, reach the most people, and connect us in ways we never could imagine. These big, outsized outpourings of feelings are possibly the most important works out there.

Case in point? The first movie to unseat Studio Ghibli’s stranglehold on the anime film box office is also one of the most unapologetically melodramatic stories in a medium already saturated with melodrama: Makoto Shinkai’s breakout smash, Your Name.

Our story centers around two ordinary teens living on modern Japan: Taki and Mitsuha. He’s a city dweller who struggles with the chaotic, never-resting life there; she’s a country girl who feels trapped out in the boonies. Both of them feel like they’re going through life missing something, wondering if they’ll ever feel satisfied with who they are. And then, unexpectedly, without having ever met each other, they wake up one day in each other’s bodies. From there on, they occasionally pop in and out of each other’s lives, communicating through messages they leave in each other’s phones, trying to make sense of the bizarre situation they’ve found themselves in while learning more about each other along the way. To say more would give away what ends up being a much more complex plot than the set-up would suggest, so I shall leave the synopsis there. Make no mistake, though, this movie goes full magical realism, using the backdrop of Shinto religion to explore big-idea topics of time, distance, separation, connection, beauty, memory, and above all, love, all in the context of following the lives of these two very likable dorks and watching how their interactions slowly begin changing each other. In a lot of ways, Your Name is pretty much the embodiment of melodrama as a principle. It’s a movie all about the intangible, overwhelming feeling of seeing something truly beautiful and holding onto it with all your might, refusing to let it slip through your fingertips.

And yes, it operates in very familiar territory to get this message across. You’ll have seen pretty much every trope and character archetype this movie uses before. The punk with a heart of gold, the country girl who wants a life free of stuffy tradition, the obviously-not-endgame-initial-crush, the overly stern father figure, corrupt politicians, teens saving the day from the inept adults, and two souls bound by fate across an immeasurable divide. But for tales like this, innovation is kind of besides the point. The point is delivering a whopping spoonful of anime’s most important commodity: sincerity. You’ve seen these tropes before, but they’re all struck with the strongest kind of self-assured filmmaking and unapoligetically corny emotionality that makes this medium so special to me. This is melodrama at its most pure, distilled essence. I was laughing along with the body swap misadventures, I cared when the story started taking a more dramatic turn, and my heart danced along to every step of Shinkai’s tune. If there’s any substantial flaw in the story, it’s that it gives by far the more interesting tale of self-actualization to Mitsha while spending far more time inside Taki’s head (there’s an idea raised early on that Taki is a delinquent who gets in a lot of fights that is, sadly, never expanded upon to any meaningful effect). But the closer we come to the climax and the further the more abstract elements of the plot take over, it becomes impossible not to be swept away by just how damn well the whole thing is put together.

Which brings me to the single most important part of the film: it’s drop-dead gorgeous animation. If you’re gonna make a movie about grasping on to big, beautiful emotions as hard as you can, than the movie itself should feel just as big and beautiful. And my god, not only does Your Name deliver on those promises, it rockets pats them into the stratosphere on the tail of a blazing comet. Shinkai has truly earned his reputation for the beauty of his oeuvre: every single shot in this film could be printed out and put on a postcard. From the insane level of detail and character in the background art to the lush, almost glistening color palette to the nuanced fluidity of the character animation to the jaw-dropping majesty of the sweeping wide shots to one particular sequence where somebody’s stream of consciousness is presented in a whirlwind of crayola chaos, this movie took my goddamn breath away too many times to count. This is why Your Name works as well as it does: the spellbinding beauty serves as a vessel through which the spellbinding the beauty the characters are chasing is reflected. You feel every single ounce of the awe and wonder they feel, every palpable sense of the world being swept out from under your feet by the grandeur of it all. As big and outsized as their emotions are, the animation lets you feel every inch of their magnitude every single step of the way. And the result is powerful, breathtaking, sometimes profound, always inspiring, and never for a second anything less than honest.

Your Name is not the best melodrama I’ve ever seen, nor is it the best melodrama I’ve seen to use such heady concepts as fuel for its star-crossed story. But it is absolutely a stunning achievement in filmmaking, a blockbuster of truly epic proportions with an unmistakably heart beating underneath. Shinkai's always been an interesting filmmaker, but his jump into the mainstream has resulted in the most exciting chapter of his career yet. And I can't wait to see where it takes him next.