Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, adapted from his own novel, Kimi No Na Wa / Your Name is a Japanese feature which has made history by becoming the first animation not made by Hayao Miyazaki’s box-office titan Studio Ghibli to take more than 10bn¥ (£76m) in the first month of domestic release, Shinkai having also adapted his books 5 Centimetres Per Second (‘07) and The Garden Of Words (‘13) into features, while his films Voices Of A Distant Star (‘03) and The Place Promised in Our Early Days (‘04), were released as tie-in novels by different writers after their production, a practise once common in the West but now not so common.

Although echoing the ‘body-swap’ phase in Hollywood movies of the early 80s, Shinkai claims to have been inspired by a classic Japanese 12th Century folk tale, Torikaebaya Monogatari, which features a sibling duo, where a boy is raised as a girl and the girl raised as a boy because of their personalities, and how they cope with their switched gender identities Shinkai seems to have hit on a combination of sci-fi, melancholy, offbeat humour and striking animation, based on genuine locations and backgrounds, which has struck a chord with the Japanese public and unsurprisingly with teenagers and younger viewers. It also has a darker side, as there is a constant threat of natural disaster, Shinkai saying that the 2011 earthquake, which claimed more than 16,000 lives, not only changed him and his view of the world, and the rest of Japanese society, who have had a severe reminder of just how fragile life can be.

With a voice cast featuring Studio Ghibli regular Ryûnosuke Kamiki (Spirited Away / Howl’s Moving Castle) as Mitsuha and Mone Kamishiraishi (Wolf Children / Nobody’s Perfect) as Taki, Shinkai has been hailed by some as being the next Hayao Miyazaki, although Miyazaki’s supposed retirement appears to have been only temporary, and of he has not yet surpassed the doyen of Japanese animation, he has certainly made a remarkable impact on the Japanese animation scene, and which seem to be set to be a global hit.