Queer Carnival, Gender, and Fascist Moments in Shinkai Makoto’s <i>Kimi no na wa</i> (<i>Your Name</i>, 2016)

In Japanese animation, queer characters and plots are sometimes centrally presented and they seem to destabilize and challenge heteronormative identity categories. However, in Shinkai Makoto’s sekai-kei animation Your Name (2016), the queering of bodies, time and place is “carnivalized,” i.e., made nonthreatening through comedy. With imaginaries of a world turned upside down, catastrophe, and nonlinear time the film references the crisis of the triple disaster of 2011. It answers such crisis with the melodramatic return to romantic and hierarchical gender formation, sexist imagery and “fascist moments” of cultural essentialism, that reify nativist and normative ideas about gender, nation, and culture.