ABSTRACT

This essay argues that by deploying the mind-game tropes of body swap and time travel, the Japanese animated film Your Name poses questions of time, memory, and mediation that must be considered in light of the 2011 national disaster. To take up these questions, I juxtapose three lines of interrogation that situate the film at varying timescales. The first analyzes the film’s use of myth to construct a unified timeline that ensures the continuation of national history. This national time, however, is warped into a cosmic scheme. Expounding on the trope of musubi or weaving, the second, mind-game inquiry thus philosophizes time beyond the national framework to better account for the protagonists’ task of historical rescue through radical experiments with fate and contingency. Inspired by the film’s portrayal of skies and clouds, the final inquiry foregrounds the naturalized environment of new media technologies that engages time and memory beyond and beneath the human perceptual frame. To conclude, I provide some critical notes that ask how an ecologically attuned mind-game paradigm anticipates alternative modes of social imagination.

摘要

本文认为，日本动画电影《你的名字》运用了身体交换和时间旅行的心理游戏比喻，提出了时间、记忆和调解问题，鉴于 2011 年的国家灾难，必须考虑这些问题。为了回答这些问题，我将电影在不同时间尺度上的三行审讯并置。第一个分析了电影使用神话来构建一个统一的时间线，以确保国家历史的延续。然而，这个国家时间被扭曲成一个宇宙计划。阐释无尾的比喻或编织，第二种，思维游戏探究因此哲学化了超越国家框架的时间，以更好地解释主人公通过命运和偶然性的激进实验来拯救历史的任务。受电影对天空和云彩的描绘的启发，最后的调查突出了新媒体技术的自然化环境，该环境在人类感知框架之外和之下参与了时间和记忆。最后，我提供了一些批判性的笔记，询问生态协调的思维游戏范式如何预测社会想象的替代模式。