Fresh off the success of his Sundance Film Festival winner Minari, writer-director Lee Isaac Chung has already lined up another major project for himself. Chung is set to adapt and direct Your Name, based on the 2016 romantic anime film directed by Makoto Shinkai. The massive global hit tells the story of two teengers who realize they are swapping bodies and must work together when impending disaster strikes.
J.J. Abrams, who was a big fan of the original film, will be producing this live-action take with his company Bad Robot and Paramount will be distributing, Deadline reports. Chung is the third writer to take a pass on the script, after The Big Sick’s Emily V. Gordon and Arrival’s Eric Heisserer previously worked on drafts. Chung’s film Minari premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to widespread critical acclaim and went on to win the Audience Award. It will be distributed by A24 at a date to be announced.
Jordan Raup said in our review, “There is no shortage of films that depict the pains of assimilation and the pursuit of the American Dream for a more promising future. It’s been customary for these stories to tell of journeys from another country to a metropolis somewhere across the land of the free. When it comes to the family of Minari, however, they’ve already been living the United States for some time, carving out a life for themselves on the West Coast. Yet Jacob (Steven Yeun) has dreams beyond separating chickens into male and female bins as a cog in industrialized farming and so he moves his Korean-American family to the rural outskirts of Arkansas where he and his wife Monica (Yeri Han) continue the same job, all while attempting to build a more fruitful living with their own farm featuring Korean produce. All the joys and struggles of this journey are captured with a keen, warm tenderness by Lee Isaac Chung, whose carefully-considered drama deserves to be a breakthrough for the writer-director, who now has five features to his name.”
See the trailer for Your Name below.