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queenluaI rewatched Your Name the other night on a nostalgic whim. When I first saw the movie, it was at a cute lil' historic independent theatre, and I was with a dear friend... annnnd nowadays, that theater is closed and the friend lives on the other side of the country. Alas! But also—weirdly fitting for the themes of the movie...?
Anyway! What struck me, this time, was how well Your Name captures this very specific sort of wild, intemperate, romance-adjacent feeling, a feeling which reminded me most of... chasing after a rare bird?
"Wow Lua do you really have to make everything about birds" shut up okay this makes sense, just hear me out
So a typical rare bird chase is: you check the local birding listserv before bed, and your eyes bug out, because, someone reported a juvenile yellow-crowned night heron? on one of the coastal islands?? with no photos or additional details???
If it's real, you have to go after it. You text your birder friends. Deranged Twitcher Guy is (of course) planning to chase the bird. Everyone else is wisely skeptical; this person probably just misidentified a regular ol' great blue heron. You contemplate your options—how much work you can miss, which meetings you'll have to skip, how likely it is it'll all be for nothing... By the time you decide you're gonna do it, it's midnight, and you need to be at the ferry by 4:30am, so, y'know. Off to a great start there.
You show up at the ferry. Deranged Twitcher Guy meets you there, and for the whole ferry ride, he's nattering on like a souped-up typewriter. You keep shifting your weight in a desperate effort not to fall asleep on your feet. The ferry has coffee. You don't even like coffee but you definitely don't like being awake at four-thirty fucking AM so you drink some damn coffee. And then once you're off the ferry, it's not over; you and Twitcher Guy gotta drive another hour to get to the spot (an obscure unmarked muddy lagoon because of course it is), and then you spend another hour tromping through mud and muck desperately searching for anything vaguely heron-looking. You didn't wear your boots; why didn't you wear your boots? Your shoes will never recover. But your ears have never been so absolutely focused in your entire life; you hear every cricket, every rustling of feathers from eagle all the way down to bushtit, every snapped twig, every ripple on the water. You are so tired you might be hallucinating a little. At this point your chest is aching with how much you want this bird, how beautiful it'll be when it finally stretches its great neck to stare at you both. If you don't see the bird you are going to cry. If you do see the bird you are going to cry. It is 8am and you should be at work but instead you are here and there's something thrilling in the petty hooky of it. This is the dumbest shit you have ever done but the mere act of doing it has made you so wildly committed to the bit. You could kiss that bird. Hell, you could even kiss Deranged Twitcher Guy—after all, he's here, he gets it, this crazy thing you both can't let go of.
....annnnd back to Your Name. It fits a little, right? Watching Taki scour the countryside by train halfway through the movie? Like, oof, I felt that.
Okay, but they weren't going for birding, right? They were going for love—or something like it, something romance-adjacent. Superficially it has the arc of a love-at-first-sight kinda story, but it works in a way most of those don't—because, instead of focusing on some raw physical attraction, or even some kind of fine-yet-predictable slow buildup of flirting... you get this bizarre thing that happens, and keeps happening, forcing them together in this absurdly intimate way, and then it's done just as quick as it started and... that's when they realize what they had. It's the wild, weird jumble of emotions that come with thrown-together-ness—which can be when you chase a rare bird, sure, but also when you swap bodies with each other at random and unpredictable times.
(Or when you're a teenager sneaking out at night, or when you're fleeing some cops with some friends, or when you've piled into a car with a bunch of strangers to go to a big convention/tournament in another city... Life's full of this kind of thing.)
By default, love stories are a little hard to sell me on, but "love due to bizarre circumstances that threw us together, and now you share this thing that literally no one else is ever ever going to understand the way we do—" yeah, I'm into that. And Your Name executes on it really well. (The bodyswapping portion of the movie wasn't nearly as long as I remembered! It's more about the arc thereafter—but the bodyswapping was what stuck out so much in my memories, haha.)
Also the movie's just really, really pretty in non-superficial ways that I can't articulate. Like, there's a decent amount of anime out there that's pretty in the sense of the colors are pleasing, the animation is fluid, and so on, but deep down it feels either flat or saccharine? That's not the case here. Everything's gorgeous, so gorgeous, it's toeing the line toward saccharine, but—not quite. I want to fall into that sky ahhh.
Anyway! What struck me, this time, was how well Your Name captures this very specific sort of wild, intemperate, romance-adjacent feeling, a feeling which reminded me most of... chasing after a rare bird?
"Wow Lua do you really have to make everything about birds" shut up okay this makes sense, just hear me out
So a typical rare bird chase is: you check the local birding listserv before bed, and your eyes bug out, because, someone reported a juvenile yellow-crowned night heron? on one of the coastal islands?? with no photos or additional details???
If it's real, you have to go after it. You text your birder friends. Deranged Twitcher Guy is (of course) planning to chase the bird. Everyone else is wisely skeptical; this person probably just misidentified a regular ol' great blue heron. You contemplate your options—how much work you can miss, which meetings you'll have to skip, how likely it is it'll all be for nothing... By the time you decide you're gonna do it, it's midnight, and you need to be at the ferry by 4:30am, so, y'know. Off to a great start there.
You show up at the ferry. Deranged Twitcher Guy meets you there, and for the whole ferry ride, he's nattering on like a souped-up typewriter. You keep shifting your weight in a desperate effort not to fall asleep on your feet. The ferry has coffee. You don't even like coffee but you definitely don't like being awake at four-thirty fucking AM so you drink some damn coffee. And then once you're off the ferry, it's not over; you and Twitcher Guy gotta drive another hour to get to the spot (an obscure unmarked muddy lagoon because of course it is), and then you spend another hour tromping through mud and muck desperately searching for anything vaguely heron-looking. You didn't wear your boots; why didn't you wear your boots? Your shoes will never recover. But your ears have never been so absolutely focused in your entire life; you hear every cricket, every rustling of feathers from eagle all the way down to bushtit, every snapped twig, every ripple on the water. You are so tired you might be hallucinating a little. At this point your chest is aching with how much you want this bird, how beautiful it'll be when it finally stretches its great neck to stare at you both. If you don't see the bird you are going to cry. If you do see the bird you are going to cry. It is 8am and you should be at work but instead you are here and there's something thrilling in the petty hooky of it. This is the dumbest shit you have ever done but the mere act of doing it has made you so wildly committed to the bit. You could kiss that bird. Hell, you could even kiss Deranged Twitcher Guy—after all, he's here, he gets it, this crazy thing you both can't let go of.
....annnnd back to Your Name. It fits a little, right? Watching Taki scour the countryside by train halfway through the movie? Like, oof, I felt that.
Okay, but they weren't going for birding, right? They were going for love—or something like it, something romance-adjacent. Superficially it has the arc of a love-at-first-sight kinda story, but it works in a way most of those don't—because, instead of focusing on some raw physical attraction, or even some kind of fine-yet-predictable slow buildup of flirting... you get this bizarre thing that happens, and keeps happening, forcing them together in this absurdly intimate way, and then it's done just as quick as it started and... that's when they realize what they had. It's the wild, weird jumble of emotions that come with thrown-together-ness—which can be when you chase a rare bird, sure, but also when you swap bodies with each other at random and unpredictable times.
(Or when you're a teenager sneaking out at night, or when you're fleeing some cops with some friends, or when you've piled into a car with a bunch of strangers to go to a big convention/tournament in another city... Life's full of this kind of thing.)
By default, love stories are a little hard to sell me on, but "love due to bizarre circumstances that threw us together, and now you share this thing that literally no one else is ever ever going to understand the way we do—" yeah, I'm into that. And Your Name executes on it really well. (The bodyswapping portion of the movie wasn't nearly as long as I remembered! It's more about the arc thereafter—but the bodyswapping was what stuck out so much in my memories, haha.)
Also the movie's just really, really pretty in non-superficial ways that I can't articulate. Like, there's a decent amount of anime out there that's pretty in the sense of the colors are pleasing, the animation is fluid, and so on, but deep down it feels either flat or saccharine? That's not the case here. Everything's gorgeous, so gorgeous, it's toeing the line toward saccharine, but—not quite. I want to fall into that sky ahhh.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 11:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 05:27 pm (UTC)and yeah, excellent choice of favorite film tbh. I remembered liking it when I first watched it, but the rewatch really made me love it for some reason; something clicked and I was just totally absorbed for the whole runtime... it's good!
no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 12:49 pm (UTC)(I'm not a birdwatchers. I'm more of a bird-looker. But I do love looking at birds!!!)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 06:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-02 02:21 am (UTC)Oh man… it’s a similar story for me as well! Me and my friend saw Your Name in theatres on an absolute whim, and she’s long since moved across the country and we haven’t spoken in a few years now.
Even as someone who doesn’t typically like romance, it was still quite beautiful and touching… this reminds me that I def need to rewatch it at some point.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-02 06:52 pm (UTC)hope you enjoy the rewatch! it holds up really well.