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Shinkai Makoto’s last movie, Kotonoha no Niwa (2013), was praised for its gorgeous animation, but criticized for being what many felt was “too short”. I beg to differ, but you all went out and said your piece, so Shinkai is back with Kimi no Na Wa, a movie that’s over ninety minutes long and really should have been a lot shorter. Its length ought to be manageable, but the poor romance plot makes an otherwise cute story a chore to slog through.

The basic gist of the film is that Mitsuha, the main female lead, lives in a small village with her grandmother and sisters. However, ... she’s not all that content with her boring life, and wishes her reincarnation would be a handsome boy living in Tokyo. The next day she wakes up seemingly in aforementioned handsome Tokyo boy’s body – it seems as if Mitsuha and Taki, the boy, are randomly switching bodies. Time travel shenanigans later ensue. It should be pretty interesting – but unfortunately, it’s not. I’ll attempt to explain why in a bit.

Let’s start with the good parts, though. The animation is, as usual for a Shinkai film, very good. It’s fluid, crisp, clean. There are several nature shots that are so realistic it seems like they might be actual pictures. You get the gist – typical Shinkai fare by now, but we’re amazed every time regardless. I’ll say just one more thing about this: Kotonoha no Niwa’s animation was far more impressive to me.

Okay, I think that’s it. Now to the middling and bad.

The movie’s soundtrack is decent, though not entirely memorable. At least I enjoyed the vocal tracks this time around. The character designs are pretty typical. I personally consider them boring. The characterization is average at best – none of the characters really stick out or display any defining tics or traits. We don’t come to know them very well, apart from maybe Mitsuha. All the characters are pretty normal human beings, but as a result, they’re a little boring to follow.

The movie’s plot is good, if not completely original, but made unpalatable by what is arguably the worst part of the movie: the romance. It is, in a nutshell, terrible. There’s no chemistry between the characters. There’s not even an indication that the two might have a crush on each other. Heck, I’m inclined to say that Kimi no Na Wa’s romance portion is completely and utterly unnecessary. It feels tacked on, as if Shinkai just realized in the last thirty minutes that he really needs to get the two main leads together at the end…because reasons. Sure, you don’t necessarily fall in love because of tangible reasons, but it was difficult for me to believe the characters were in love by the end of the movie.

The blunt truth is that Kimi no Na Wa would have been a lot more interesting – and the romance a bit more relatable – if the movie were about how Mitsuha and Taki adjusted to switching bodies. But the movie isn’t about that: instead, we’re treated to a montage and some narration of how Mitsuha and Taki coped with the situation. There’s no finesse about it. It’s just a half-explored gimmick to make the movie seem cooler, and to make it longer. The last thirty to forty minutes are almost an entirely different film. It would have been a lot better to keep the two concepts in the movie separate, since Shinkai did not succeed in melding them together, in my opinion. In the end, the length of the movie and its unexplored, half-developed concepts really, really hurt the movie.

Kimi no Na Wa is one of the most overrated anime movie films of recent years. It is most certainly not Shinkai Makoto’s greatest work, and does not deserve to be called a magnum opus. People who call it original or breathtaking have clearly never seen the 2006 movie The Lake House – Hollywood, yes, and a remake of a Korean film, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s got a much better and more feasible romance in it. There’s no romance in Kimi no Na Wa, and as such, it fails as a romance movie. It also fails as a drama movie, since I did not feel connected to the characters. Overall, it’s saved from complete mediocrity by a serviceable OST and some pretty animation.