Production Budget Analysis

What was the production budget for Your Name.?

Directed by Makoto Shinkai, with Ryunosuke Kamiki, Mone Kamishiraishi, Ryo Narita leading the cast, Your Name. was produced by CoMix Wave Films with a confirmed budget of $7,500,000, placing it in the micro-budget category for animation films.

At $7,500,000, Your Name. was produced on a modest budget. Lower-budget films benefit from reduced break-even thresholds, with profitability achievable at approximately $18,750,000.

Budget Comparison — Similar Productions

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966): Budget $7,500,000 | Gross $33,736,689 → ROI: 350% • Breaking the Waves (1996): Budget $7,500,000 | Gross $23,000,000 → ROI: 207% • (500) Days of Summer (2009): Budget $7,500,000 | Gross $60,781,545 → ROI: 710% • Juno (2007): Budget $7,500,000 | Gross $232,372,681 → ROI: 2998% • The Bye Bye Man (2017): Budget $7,400,000 | Gross $26,700,000 → ROI: 261%

Key Budget Allocation Categories

▸ Animation Production Pipeline The bulk of an animated film's budget funds the multi-year production pipeline: storyboarding, character modeling, rigging, animation, lighting, rendering, and compositing. Major studio animated features employ 300–600 artists over 3–5 years.

▸ Voice Talent Celebrity voice casting has become standard for studio animation, with A-list actors earning $5–15 million for voice roles.

▸ Music, Songs & Sound Design Original songs and orchestral scores are central to animated storytelling. Sound design for animated worlds must be created entirely from scratch.

Key Production Personnel

CAST: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Mone Kamishiraishi, Ryo Narita, Aoi Yuuki, Nobunaga Shimazaki Key roles: Ryunosuke Kamiki as Taki Tachibana (voice); Mone Kamishiraishi as Mitsuha Miyamizu (voice); Ryo Narita as Katsuhiko Teshigawara (voice); Aoi Yuuki as Sayaka Natori (voice)

DIRECTOR: Makoto Shinkai CINEMATOGRAPHY: Makoto Shinkai, Hitomi Fukuzawa MUSIC: Yojiro Noda, Takahito Sakurai EDITING: Makoto Shinkai PRODUCTION: CoMix Wave Films, TOHO, KADOKAWA, jeki, AMUSE, voque ting, Lawson Entertainment FILMED IN: Japan

Box Office Performance

Your Name. earned $5,017,246 domestically and $400,302,886 internationally, for a worldwide total of $405,320,132. International markets drove the majority of revenue (99%), indicating strong global appeal.

Break-Even Analysis

Using the industry-standard 2.5x multiplier (P&A + exhibitor shares of 40–50% + distribution fees), Your Name. needed approximately $18,750,000 to break even. The film surpassed this threshold by $386,570,132.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Revenue: $405,320,132 Budget: $7,500,000 Net: $397,820,132 ROI: 5304.3%

Profitability Assessment

VERDICT: Highly Profitable

Your Name. was a clear financial success, generating $405,320,132 worldwide against a $7,500,000 production budget — a 5304% ROI. After estimated marketing costs, the film still delivered substantial profit to CoMix Wave Films.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

The outsized success of Your Name. likely influenced studio greenlight decisions for similar animation projects.

Various characters from Your Name, especially its protagonists Taki Tachibana and Mitsuha Miyamizu, appeared in Shinkai's succeeding film Weathering with You (2016; also the second of his disaster trilogy), as well as in its light novelization.

Nekotofu, creator of the manga series Onimai: I'm Now Your Sister!, cited Your Name as an influence, stating that the popularity of the film motivated the creation of the series. According to Crunchyroll, the success of Your Name helped push non-Ghibli anime films into a more mainstream place in Japan, and changed trends in not merely in the production of anime films but also in their promotion.

Your Name has been referenced and parodied in popular culture, including in the eighth episode of Little Witch Academia and the third episode of Gabriel DropOut; others include a pornographic spoof of the film titled Your Rope (2017), Complicity (a 2018 Japanese film), the first episode of Pop Team Epic, Shirobako: The Movie, the video game Last Stop, a promotional advertisement for a season of the online game Fortnite, and the first episode of the second season of The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You.

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Production

Makoto Shinkai conceived the film's plot following his July 2011 visit to the fishing village of Yuriage in Natori following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Reflecting on the devastation, he thought: "this could have been my town". He subsequently conceived an idea for a film in which the positions of the residents of Yuriage would be swapped with the viewers. During his visit, Shinkai produced various sketches, some of which have been displayed in exhibitions.

Shinkai delivered his initial film proposal to Toho on September 14, 2014, with the original title of , derived from a line in a attributed to Ono no Komachi. Its title was later changed to and before being finalized as Kimi no Na wa (). On December 31, 2014, Shinkai announced that he had been writing the film's storyboard.

Inspiration for the plot was derived from various literary works, including Shūzō Oshimi's Inside Mari, Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma ½, the Heian period tale Torikaebaya Monogatari, and Greg Egan's short story The Safe-Deposit Box. Shinkai also cited influence from Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014). Meanwhile, Shinkai and his team scrutinized their earlier work for reference, such as Crossroads, a television advertisement for Z-kai (2014), and 5 Centimeters per Second (2007).

While the town of Itomori, one of the film's principal settings, is fictional, the film drew inspirations from real-life locations that provided a backdrop for the town. These include the city of Hida and its library.

▸ Music & Score

The score of Your Name was composed by Yojiro Noda, the lead vocalist of the Japanese rock band Radwimps. Shinkai requested him to conceive its incidental music "in a way that the music will [supplement] the dialogue or monologue of the characters". Its soundtrack was well-received by critics and audiences alike and is acknowledged as one of the factors behind the film's commercial success. *

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: 17 wins & 27 nominations total

Awards Won: ★ Mainichi Film Award for Best Animation Film ★ Synergy Award (11th Seiyu Awards)

Additional Recognition: ! colspan="8" style="background: LightSteelBlue;" | List of awards and nominations

! Year ! Award ! Category ! Recipient(s) ! Result

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Your Name was met with widespread critical acclaim. Based on 119 reviews, review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 98% of critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "As beautifully animated as it is emotionally satisfying, Your Name adds another outstanding chapter to writer-director Makoto Shinkai's filmography". On Metacritic, the film has a score of 81 out of 100 based on 26 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

Mark Schilling of The Japan Times gave the film a rating of 4 out of 5 and praised the film's animation for its "blend of gorgeous, realistic detail and emotionally grounded fantasy". Reception outside of Japan was also highly positive. Mark Kermode called the film his ninth favorite film to be released in the United Kingdom in 2016. American reviews were generally positive: in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis described it as "a wistfully lovely Japanese tale", while David Sims of The Atlantic said it was "a dazzling new work of anime". Furthermore, The Boston Globe had a positive opinion of the film, saying that it was "pretty but too complicated". Mike Toole from Anime News Network listed it as the third-best anime film of all time. John Musker and Ron Clements, directors of the Disney animated films The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, Treasure Planet, The Princess and the Frog, and Moana, praised the film for its beauty and originality.

Despite the praise he received, Shinkai insisted that the film was not as good as it could have been: "There are things we could not do, [the director of animation] Masashi Ando wanted to keep working [on] but had to stop us for lack of money [...] For me, it's incomplete, unbalanced. The plot is fine but the film is not at all perfect. Two years was not enough".