A trope filled, largely forgettable film that does a lot of those tropes well, but not much else

In some ways this movie was almost exactly what I expected, but the unfortunate thing is that I felt like it fell in line with my expectations a bit too strongly to the point where I didn't really feel any particular moments that really outright impressed me at all. Practically everything about Your Name feels very tropey, fitting into the same category of the multitude of other Japanese animated movies that come out on a regular basis, albeit all being very nicely executed on most fronts to put it that slight cut above a lot of them. I found this particularly true with the art, giving off an almost dreamy vibe at points and occasionally giving some room for some genuinely cool bits of visual creativity that enhanced the overall experience quite a lot.

That said I still wasn't completely sold on the film despite this, as while a lot of this was clearly aimed towards delivering a character driven narrative experience, the characters were funnily enough one of the least interesting parts to be found. None of the characters really feel as if they have any sort of meaningful growth and when the movie hinges on the dynamic between the cast and how it changes between swaps, it ends up feeling unengaging as a result of all differences between the two characters feeling very surface level, with no real depth to any of them. This became especially difficult to stomach once the movie seemed deadset on making the viewer deeply care about what went on with the characters, essentially screaming at you "Feel sad now!!!! Bad things happened so you should be sad!!!!!!".

In terms of plot I felt quite similarly, as while there were quite a few twists thrown around to elevate the tension of scenes and build towards the climactic final act, a lot of the time things felt rather slow without contributing much to the overall atmosphere or liveliness of the settings beyond once again, the more surface level things. As a final note, the soundtrack in this was genuinely awful and singlehandedly was able to ruin a significant amount of scenes, with the stereotypical style of rock completely killing the tension all over the place and replacing it with really sappy melodrama.

Despite all my negativity in this review, I still liked this movie to some extent, simply because while it's safe and doesn't really have anything that really provokes any thought beyond a few needlessly convoluted story beats, it's ultimately very competent across the board and is able to somewhat create interest through its art. Give it a watch if you're one who quite enjoys a lot of the common tropes for this type of movie, because this movie does tropes really well, not even in a negative way, just depends on how much you enjoy that sort of stuff to begin with.