What We Talk about When We Talk about Anime Logic: Your Name (Kimi no Na wa / 君の名は, 2016)

A scene from Your Name (Kimi no Na wa / 君の名は, 2016).

I want to talk about anime logic and why it's not the same as plot holes, using a number of examples, but mainly looking at Your Name (Kimi no Na wa / 君の名は, 2016).
 
Let's get the obvious out of the way: Your Name is not an absolute triumph. In fact, I agree wholeheartedly with director Makoto Shinkai when he says the film is "imperfect" and that the production process could have used more time (that is, more money). Narratively, we can separate the film into three acts: set-up, reversal, resolution. (Hegel , anyone?) While the reversal is a bit boring, and the resolution is downright melodramatic, the set-up is a shining gem. We all expect body-swap stories to create fish-out-of-water comedic situations (which I personally detest because the protagonists create so many problems for the hapless people around them), so it's a pleasant surprise when the continual body-swapping between city boy Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and country girl Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi) leads them to work together to keep calm and carry on with their lives – and it's satisfyingly funny to see them keep meddling in each other's lives anyway.

Summer Musicals: Rock and Roll Man and The Light in the Piazza

The cast of Rock and Roll Man: The Alan Freed Story. (Photo: Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware)

Rock and Roll Man: The Alan Freed Story is a new jukebox musical, currently in a Berkshire Theatre Group production at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, about the DJ who coined the term “rock and roll” and helped to promote what had been called “race music” and kept off white radio stations. Freed was a tireless supporter of African American artists like Little Richard and Chuck Berry; when their songs were covered by white-bread singers like Pat Boone, he refused to play the white versions, and he featured them prominently in the concerts he produced. But his career was shattered in the late fifties by payola and copyright scandals, and he died from the effects of alcoholism at the age of forty-three, in 1965. (You can see him in cameos in the mid-fifties movies Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock, as well as a few others; Tim McIntire played a character inspired by him, memorably, in the nifty 1978 Floyd Mutrux picture American Hot Wax.)