‘Your Name’ Live-Action Movie Gets A New Director

Paramount, Toho, and Bad Robot’s upcoming live-action movie re-imagining of 2016’s hit Japanese anime film Your Name has found its director in Lee Isaac Chung. Chung has been tapped to direct Your Name’s live-action version., after gaining acclaim with his latest film Minari, which was acquired by Hollywood studios Plan B and A24 and won the Grand Jury and Audience Awards at Sundance 2020. Chung will direct from a script by Emily V. Gordon (The Big Sick), who did an updated draft of the script originally written by Eric Heisserer (Arrival).

This latest version of Hollywood and Toho’s live-action take on Your Name seems like it will be in much the same vein as the earlier version of the film. In early 2019 it was announced that Amazing Spider-Man’s Marc Webb would direct Eric Heisserer’s script, and that the story would revolve around “a young Native American woman living in a rural area and a young man from Chicago who discover they are magically and intermittently swapping bodies. When a disaster threatens to upend their lives, they must journey to meet and save their worlds.” For comparison, Deadline‘s report on this latest iteration of the live-action Your Name will tell the story of, “two teenagers who discover they are magically and intermittently swapping bodies. When a disaster threatens to upend their lives, they must journey to meet and save their worlds.”

The original Your Name followed a city boy in Tokyo, Japan, and a girl from a rural town, who wake up one day to find they have swapped bodies. In trying to investigate the phenomenon, as well as identify the stranger whose body they each inhabit, the boy and girl follow clues that lead them toward one another’s lives. The twist in the film is that this meeting of souls is happening across time as well as space, and the boy soon discovers that the girl and her town were wiped out in a comet strike, three years prior. However, through body-switching ability, the boy is able to get a message to the girl and advert the disaster, changing history. The film ends with the two figures – who never successfully traded names during the film, despite several attempts – finally getting to truly meet one another.

It’s the kind of romantic ghost story with a sci-fi twist that could make for a truly epic live-action film. While we don’t know what happened with Marc Webb in the director’s chair, anime fans will no doubt be happy to hear that an actual Asian director will be taking the helm. Original Your Name director Makoto Shinkai has already expressed support for this Hollywood re-imagining.