Your Name Guide: Where to Stream, Cast and Everything to Know

The film that made Makoto Shinkai a household name

Your Name is the easiest entry point into Makoto Shinkai’s work, and still his best one. Mitsuha, a teenage girl in a small mountain town, and Taki, a boy in Tokyo, start waking up in each other’s bodies with no warning and no explanation. For a long stretch the film plays that for comedy – Taki fumbling through a girls’ school routine, Mitsuha accidentally groping herself in Taki’s body on day one – before it turns into something stranger and sadder. Saying more than that spoils the turn the film takes around its midpoint, and the turn is the reason people talk about this movie years later.

It is a Makoto Shinkai film, so the look of it is part of the pitch: hyper-detailed skies, light through train windows, a comet that the marketing wisely doesn’t explain. RADWIMPS’ soundtrack, especially the song “Zenzenzense,” is doing as much emotional work as the animation. the film’s production history covers its run: by 2019 it had overtaken Spirited Away as the highest-grossing anime film worldwide, a record it held until Demon Slayer: Mugen Train passed it in 2020.

Watch it subbed or dubbed; both are on Hulu and the English cast, led by Ryunosuke Kamiki and Mone Kamishiraishi’s Japanese performances alongside Michael Sinterniklaas’s English Taki, is solid either way. If this is your first Shinkai film and you want the next one, our Suzume guide covers the film he made after it – same director, same eye for disaster and connection, a different and more grounded story. For everything else we’re tracking by release date, see our watch guides.