A Timeline-Based Analysis for the Foreshadowing in the Story of Your Name (2016)

Animation has been a popular form of feature length movie. In addition to the mean of entertainment, some animated works move audiences deeply and even arouse their reflection. In order to achieve this, the setup of story structure is critical, and the arrangement of the time and setting of foreshadowing in plots influence significantly on audiences’ understanding and feeling towards films. Your Name, directed by Japanese animation director, Makoto Shinkai, was an animated feature film released in 2016, soon received high praise by audiences and film review critics, and ended with the highest gross in box office of the director’s works ever. The story of this animation is special for its non-linear structure, which is seldom seen in feature length animated works. The question on how this non-linear structure presents a compelling story and touch audiences so deeply is worth to explore in depth. There is very few analytical study that dedicates on the examination of the foreshadowing based on timeline from an empirical point of view in the area of narrative studies. Hence, this study investigates the spatial-time arrangement, and foreshadowing of plots in Your Name with the basis of timeline in the film. The textual analysis is undertaken with timeline by deconstructing events and elements in the story to look into the arrangement of foreshadowing. The result indicates that the spatial-time structure is complicated by keeps jumping between the year 2013 and 2016 from the two main characters’ point of views in different locations, and ends in the year 2021. There are six elements of foreshadowing in this story, and each of them corresponds to important turning points of the story. They appear in the first and the second act of the story to progress the storyline and make the story reasonable through the functions of advanced notice and advanced mention, and gradually echo and accumulate to build up the climax of the narrative to cross over to the third act. In spite of the three settings of the story, the crash of meteorite, the exchanging of body and soul,and the time traveling are rather ordinary, elements of foreshadowing originated form Japanese folk culture interweave plots of the story to create its specialty.