Love and time: Here’s why ‘Your Name’ and ‘Petite Maman’ should be on your watch list

Whether you’re an old hand at arthouse or just dipping a toe into the rising otaku subculture of anime aficionados around the world, this column lists curated titles that challenge, comfort, and occasionally combust your expectations.

Though they arrive from opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum, both of this week’s selections —Your Name (available on Crunchyroll) and Petite Maman (streaming on MUBI) —hinge on the same wager, that time becomes intelligible only when filtered through intimacy, and that intimacy often requires a minor breach in reality to become legible at all.

From the drawing board

Released in 2016 and written and directed by anime auteur Makoto Shinkai, Kimi no Na wa(Your Name) follows two Japanese high school students whose lives occupy separate geographies, social registers, and eventually years. Mitsuha Miyamizu lives in Itomori, a rural town shaped by Shinto cosmology and the claustrophobia of small-community surveillance, while Taki Tachibana navigates contemporary Tokyo with the distracted competence of a teenager splitting his attention between school, a restaurant job, and the low-grade loneliness of urban routine. After a comet passes overhead, they begin waking up in each other’s bodies on alternating days, forced to inhabit unfamiliar social codes, family dynamics, and physical vulnerabilities while leaving behind written instructions to limit collateral damage.

The film’s immense popularity, bolstered by J-Rock sensation Radwimps’s propulsive score and Shinkai’s hyper-articulated backgrounds, occasionally obscures how severe its emotional logic really is. Seen within Shinkai’s broader body of work, it functions as a culmination and inflection point.

His earlier films, particularly 5 Centimeters per Second and Voices of a Distant Star, treated separation as an immutable condition enforced by distance, technology, and the slow violence of time, with characters learning to live alongside loss rather than intervene against it. Your Name retains that preoccupation with misalignment while introducing the possibility that history itself might be nudged through collective action. This shift would become explicit in Shinkai’s later films, where catastrophe presses directly against questions of agency and responsibility. Weathering with You escalates the dilemma by staging romance against climate instability, while Suzume reframes disaster as something sealed, mourned, and ritually contained.

A still from ‘Your Name’
| Photo Credit:
Crunchyroll

The film’s intertextual circuitry makes that positioning clearer. Its body-swap premise carries echoes of Freaky Friday and Ranma ½, though Shinkai drains those influences of their comedic endgames in favour of sustained unease. Its temporal crossings recall Interstellar and Netflix’s Dark, in their shared interest of love stretched thin by relativistic delay. Even the final staircase encounter gestures toward the open-ended romantic closures of Before Sunrise and Tokyo Story.

Foreign affairs

Written and directed by French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, Petite Maman follows eight-year-old Nelly as she accompanies her parents to her late grandmother’s house in the aftermath of a death that has left her mother Marion visibly unmoored. When Marion departs without explanation, Nelly wanders into the nearby woods and meets another girl her age, also named Marion, who is building a small shelter from fallen branches and lives in an earlier version of the same house, where Nelly’s grandmother remains alive.

Sciamma refuses explanatory scaffolding, allowing the logic of childhood to govern the exchange. Nelly and young Marion meet as peers, sharing meals, games, anxieties, and secrets. Through these encounters, Nelly gains access to this likeminded girl’s childhood fears, and ambitions, while Marion receives reassurance from a future that cannot disclose itself fully but offers steadiness where it can.

Formally spare and meticulously observed, the film builds meaning through performance, blocking, and duration to articulate generational continuity without flattening difference. The casting of identical twins (Josephine and Gabrielle Sanz) sharpens this inquiry, allowing Sciamma to examine resemblance as both comfort and constraint, while Claire Mathon’s restrained cinematography keeps the emotional field grounded in domestic textures and natural light.

A still from ‘Petite Maman’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI

Read against Sciamma’s broader filmography, Petite Maman is a distillation of concerns she had already pushed to their most rigorous extreme in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, particularly her interest in relationships structured by shared attention and the ethics of looking. Where Portrait stages intimacy as something forged through sustained observation and delayed articulation, Petite Maman miniaturises that framework, replacing romantic desire with filial curiosity while preserving the principle that understanding grows from time spent together.

In this sense, Petite Maman shares DNA with works like Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo Celeste, and Lukas Dhonte’s Close, that preserve childhood perception as structurally sufficient, even as it retains the austere formal discipline that links Sciamma more closely to auteurs such as Chantal Akerman — which also helps explain why it pairs so irresistibly with Shinkai’s more maximalist sensibilities in Your Name.

Ctrl+Alt+Cinema is a fortnightly column that brings you handpicked gems from the boundless offerings of world cinema and anime.

Published – February 06, 2026 04:42 pm IST