Movies Like Your Name.

Frequently asked about Your Name.

Common questions people search for, with answers written by us at MoviesPack.

• Why did Your Name not win an Oscar?▾

  Your Name was not nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the 2017 ceremony, so it could not win. It was eligible but failed to make the shortlist, a snub widely attributed to the Academy's historical bias against non-Disney/Pixar and non-Studio Ghibli anime productions.

• What anime movie took 7 years to make?▾

  The Red Turtle and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya are often cited as animated films with roughly eight-year productions, while Makoto Shinkai's earlier work and Studio Ghibli projects like Ponyo had multi-year cycles. No widely documented anime film is specifically known as taking exactly seven years to make.

• Is Suzume a sequel to Your Name?▾

  No, Suzume is not a sequel to Your Name. It is a separate standalone film directed by Makoto Shinkai, released in 2022, and shares only thematic elements like disaster, fate, and young protagonists rather than a connected story or characters.

• Why do Taki and Mitsuha keep forgetting each other after they stop body-swapping?▾

  The body-swapping is connected to the comet Tiamat and to the mystical time-crossing nature of Mitsuha's town, Itomori. Once the comet strikes and Mitsuha's timeline diverges from Taki's memory, the supernatural thread between them unravels, and the memories fade — a rule Mitsuha's grandmother calls 'musubi' (the binding force). The forgetting is framed as a natural consequence of crossing the boundary between life and death: Mitsuha died in the comet strike three years before Taki's present, and normal memory cannot hold onto someone from across that threshold.

• How is it possible that Taki and Mitsuha are body-swapping across a three-year time gap?▾

  The film never gives a strictly logical explanation, treating the phenomenon as a spiritual one rooted in Mitsuha's Shinto heritage and the approaching comet. Mitsuha's family shrine teaches that time is not a straight line but a braid ('musubi'), and the comet's periodic return ties the two timelines together. Taki is in 2016 while Mitsuha is in 2013, and it is only when Taki finds the disaster-relief records near the film's midpoint that he — and the audience — realises the three-year gap.

• What happens during the 'twilight hour' (kataware-doki) scene on the mountaintop?▾

  When Taki drinks the kuchikamizake (sake Mitsuha made from her own saliva) at the shrine's crater, he temporarily inhabits Mitsuha's body in her own timeline — the only moment they are simultaneously present in the same time and place. The 'twilight hour' is a liminal period when the boundary between worlds thins, allowing them to see each other face-to-face as themselves for the first time. The moment ends abruptly at sunset, and both lose their memories of each other's names, which is why Taki scrawls 'I like you' on Mitsuha's hand instead of writing his name.

• Did Mitsuha actually die when the comet hit Itomori?▾

  In the original timeline, yes — Mitsuha and most of Itomori's residents were killed when a fragment of the comet Tiamat struck the town. Taki's intervention changes this: using the memories from the body-swap, he guides Mitsuha to evacuate the townspeople before the impact, saving over four hundred lives including Mitsuha's own. The film confirms she survives in the altered timeline, though both protagonists lose all memory of each other as a result of rewriting that past.

• Why don't Taki and Mitsuha recognise each other when they pass on the Tokyo train early in the film?▾

  That brief encounter on the train occurs before either of them has become consciously aware of the body-swapping, so neither has a name or clear face to attach to their fragmentary dreams. By that point Mitsuha has already been writing in Taki's phone and leaving notes, but the memory of the other person remains dream-like and just out of reach. The scene is also chronologically out of order from Taki's perspective — it is Mitsuha travelling to Tokyo to find the boy from her dreams, placing it in 2013 while Taki's storyline is 2016.