If there’s anything you wanted to know about your name., it’s probably here. Of course, you can swoon over gorgeous stills of the movie as well, but your name.: The Official Visual Guide provides a thorough behind-the-scenes look from Shinkai, the leads’ voice actors, staff, and more.
your name.: The Official Visual Guide is about 125 pages long. The book is about 8.5 x 11, softcover, and has a dust jacket. There are several sections, but don’t have special borders or colors to make them easily identifiable if you want to jump back into one. Still, the print quality is great, so right away, this release is highly recommendable to fans.
The first section is the longest: it’s a thorough synopsis of the film with plenty of screen captures and key quotes to accompany it. For a lot of people, this may be the least important section of this artbook. After all, it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Pictures range in size from about the size of a thumbprint to the size of a handprint, so this isn’t a release where you get to see just one or two pictures per scene or parts skipped over.
Along those same lines, later on, your name.: The Official Visual Guide includes images of the backgrounds and locations. The latter some people may want to take notes from if they ever go to Japan, whether you want to make a your name. pilgrimage or just want to get some cool ideas of where to visit.
Of course, an artbook like this would be remiss without some concept art and character bios.
But the real meat here lies in the interviews. Taki’s and Mitsuha’s Japanese voice actors discuss how they did their body swapped voices, RADWIMPS discuss the ups and downs of the soundtrack, and there’s a brief look at other bodyswap titles. Shinkai, of course, shares his thoughts on your name. and his career, but I think my favorite was the joint interview he did with Taki’s VA, Ryunosuke Kamiki. Kamiki is a self-admitted Shinkai fan, and hearing him discuss what he got out of the films with the director was very interesting. Also neat was the differences in hiring a screen actor like Kamiki versus an anime voice actor.
My biggest disappoint is not having more concept art. There’s a bit, like a page showing Shinkai’s original proposal, but unfortunately, his text is left untranslated. Although it’s just a small version of a page, the text isn’t illegible; even I can read most of the kanji. Other scribbles here and elsewhere are understandably left alone, but this one would have been nice. So would have been nice to see, for example, early drafts of the characters like the character designer’s original take on Tesshi.
So with your name. being such a popular title, it would have been easier to give this a 5-star rating. Fans of the film will still probably find this 5-star worthy, but if you are hoping for more of a The Making of experience, then The Official Visual Guide falls a little short.