The Film I Return to When I Need to Feel

This piece touches on key moments from Kimi no Na Wa. If you haven’t seen it, you might want to experience the story first.

I’m generally quite stoic about things. Stories I read or watch don’t often evoke strong emotions in me. I usually see what an author wants me to feel and I often admire the craft of it, but the real emotional hit rarely lands. Kimi no Na Wa is special to me because it slipped through the gaps in my emotional armor. It made me feel something raw, intense, and strangely comforting — a feeling I don’t often experience. It felt like a movie made specifically for me, somehow hitting every note in a way that made my chest ache in that bittersweet, beautiful way you only get from something that moves you deeply.

In the years since its release, I’ve watched it roughly once a year, just to relive what it makes me feel. I avoid watching it too often, because there’s a kind of magic in meeting those feelings again after some time has passed. Every rewatch reminds me that I’m still capable of being moved like that.

Connection

In many ways, consciousness is an incredibly lonely experience. The real you is trapped inside your brain and the full richness and beauty of your conscious experience never quite reaches others. Words and actions fail to express the full complexity of our inner lives. Sometimes, I feel that that I am the only person in the world who truly understands me.

And yet we try. We reach for connection anyway. We yearn for others to understand us even if we may not be open to understanding others. Talking to a partner after a bad day, messaging an old friend to catch up, stopping a stranger to comment on a shirt you like — all of these are small attempts to say, “Here is who I am. Do you see me?” Even a moment of being understood can feel grounding, almost sacred. We feel how beautiful it can be and we fight hard to hold on to moments like these. Kimi no Na Wa captures this yearning beautifully.

Watching Kimi no Na Wa reminded me how rare it is to feel truly seen by another person, and how much I crave that even when I pretend I don’t. When the mountain god swaps the bodies of Mitsuha and Taki, they begin to understand each other in a way that’s impossible to express through words. They know each other, having lived as each other. We see this wordless, mutual understanding and we yearn for it. When the body swapping stops, Taki understands how beautiful that connection was and goes to great lengths to hold on to it. It brings him all the way to the shrine in the mountain where he is finally able to meet up with Mitsuha in person. Something inside me softened when I watched that scene. It was the kind of emotional clarity that hits you before you even know why.

The movie also explores connection through tradition. The Miyamizu family’s rituals. Weaving threads and making kuchikamisake form a link to ancestors they will never meet, a kind of understanding that reaches across time. When written records vanish and memories fade, the act of continuing the tradition keeps that connection alive. It felt deeply human to me. It’s the same feeling I experienced when I visited an ancient market street in China where modern shops like Chagee and Shake Shack had been set up. The brands and the foods have changed but there I was, walking through the market streets, buying food and picking up something cute for my partner just like someone from 200 years ago.

And in the end, it’s these connections across lives, time, and impossible circumstances that save Itomori. Taki’s devotion to Mitsuha makes him fight for a connection that transcends logic. Mitsuha’s devotion to her family’s traditions gives her the means to link back to him. The entire story is a reminder that truly being understood is one of the most meaningful experiences we can have.

Beauty

Like much of Shinkai’s work, the film radiates beauty in a way that feels almost physical. His worlds always look as if a storm has just passed and everything has been washed clean, crisp, fresh, luminous. The colors are soft but vivid, and there’s a calming coolness to them, as if the entire story takes place in a long, unending twilight.

That twilight motif isn’t just visual; it’s emotional. The in-between hour is where boundaries blur between night and day, between present and past, between two people who shouldn’t be able to meet. The movie lives in that liminal place, and watching it, I found myself sinking into that same feeling: suspended between reality and longing.

And in that twilight space, the boundary between my experiencing self and the observing self eroded too, and created a space for me to feel as a whole.

Music

RADWIMPS is the best possible choice to score a movie like this as their music perfectly expresses the mood of optimism and beauty tinged with a slight sense of loss. The main theme is inextricably woven into the moods and emotional arc of the story. The initial disbelief and dreaminess of the body swapping, the joy in Taki and Mitsuha’s growing realization that they care about each other,, the pain and loss of the discovery that the town has already been lost to the meteor strike, the tension and hope in the final body swap, and the swell of emotion during their meeting on the train in the final scene. The music takes us through it all.

A Once-in-a-Generation Story

Kimi no Na Wa feels like a movie where everything — the story, the art, the music, the themes — was braided perfectly into a story that touches the soul. It’s the kind of story that leaves you with a strange, beautiful sense of loss, because you wish the story could be real. You wish these people existed, that this connection existed, that this kind of understanding existed.

And maybe that’s why I return to it every year. It reminds me that beneath all my stoicism, I can feel deeply. It reminds me that real connection is worth longing for, worth chasing, worth holding onto. It showed me a part of myself I don’t often see.