Weathering With You is an odd, enchanting teen romance from the director of Your Name
Film Reviews Movie Review
Depending on how the next decade of life on Earth goes, people may one day look back on writer-director Makoto Shinkai’s offbeat animated fantasy-romance Weathering With You as one of the most prescient movies of its era. If we’re lucky, it’ll be seen as merely quaint. Or if we’re extremely unlucky, this sweet, imaginative film might be criticized for downplaying whatever humanity-eradicating disasters may lay ahead.
Shinkai is best-known for his 2016 feature Your Name, a similarly visionary metaphysical love story, about two very different teenagers—one from the country and one from the city—who learn a lot about their respective worlds when they mysteriously swap bodies. Weathering With You is also about a couple of mismatched adolescents—a small-town runaway named Hodaka Morishima and a mystically powered orphan from Tokyo named Hina Amano—who form a bond in the not-too-distant future, when Japan is swallowed up by rising sea waters and near-constant rain. Shinkai seems more concerned with Weathering With You’s supernatural elements and its love story than he is with delivering any kind of warning to his audience about climate change. If anything, the movie seems to accept a permanently flooded Tokyo as an inevitability.
As with Your Name, the main characters are remarkably well-drawn. Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo or Brandon Engman in the respective Japanese- and English-language cuts being released in the States) is a poor kid who burns through his money during his first few days in Tokyo, but is rescued by a couple of unlikely guardian angels: Hina (Nana Mori or Ashley Boettcher), a fast-food cashier who slips him hamburgers on the sly; and Keisuke Suga (Shun Oguri or Lee Pace), a muckraking journalist who hires Hodaka to chase sensational stories alongside his vivacious assistant, Natsumi. It’s on one of those assignments that Hodaka crosses paths again with Hina, who’s rumored to be a “sunshine girl,” capable of manipulating the gloomy weather over the city and offering neighborhoods a few hours of warmth and light.
Hina, meanwhile, has been living on her own with her younger brother ever since their mother died. The smitten Hodaka helps his new friend make a good, off-the-books living from her ability to bring temporary blue skies. But the more she uses the power, the more disconnected she becomes from the physical world, and the more chaotic the weather subsequently becomes. Making matters worse, the authorities are closing in on both these kids, trying to force them back onto the grid. Weathering With You is at its best early on, when it’s the dreamy tale of two unsupervised teens, bopping around the big city, spreading joy and dodging the law, barely worrying about tomorrow. Shinkai and his animators have a way of turning even the most mundane details of architecture and commercial design into a staging ground for moments that are wondrous, exciting, and at times thrillingly beautiful.
Down the stretch, the movie becomes more of a blockbuster action picture, with car chases, gunplay, and magic. And throughout, it’s hard to pin down exactly what Shinkai means to say about the world to come. The way the story plays out—in its epilogue in particular—seems to suggest it’d be better for all of us if we just adjusted to the challenges of a warming, water-logged planet, rather than to try to fix it. Still, once again Shinkai presents a relationship that’s easy to root for, because it’s so easy to identify with what these youngsters want. In the opening scenes, Hodaka struggles just to find a warm, dry place where he can sit for an hour and eat a steaming bowl of noodles. Later, while they’re on the run, Hodaka and Hina use some of their black market money to take refuge in a luxury hotel, where they gorge on snacks. These two have pretty attainable goals: security, companionship, junk food.
This is what ultimately makes the movie’s climate-change backdrop more poignant than perplexing. By the end of Weathering With You, this has become a story about two people with their whole lives ahead of them, navigating their way through a future where they pine for things we all take for granted. Like, say, the simple pleasure of a sunny day.
22 Comments
Not having seen this as yet, I can’t say whether or not they cover what I’m about to say. Caveat delivered.I can see an argument for this simply reflecting teenage worldview. Everything is forever – your teen years, the rainstorm keeping you inside, it’s hard to think beyond the current situation you’re in if you don’t have the luxury of the step back to get perspective and teens (kids in general) are rightly known for frequently not getting the perspective needed to judge things as a whole.Why wouldn’t they simply accept things as they are? They aren’t apparently being portrayed as activists in any way. Heck, looking at the state of the world and how most people are behaving even “trying to get by with the new state of things” is too much to ask. We can’t even get the organizations and governments needed to make things happen to move past the point of “I see your island nations are now knee deep underwater. Oh well, must not be anything I need to worry about”. Relatively nihilistic acceptance is seductive and in many cases likely the only sane response.
You’re in the ballpark. It’s more Hina accepting a mystical fate that’s been handed to her and Hodaka defying it, asserting that she has agency and a right to her own life, consequences for others be damned. It’s sort of the anti-Spock logic of “Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
Shinkai really does have one of the most bulletproof filmographies out there. Always gonna be one of my automatic-watch creatives. Can’t wait to see this!
Ohohohohohoho, thus speaks someone who has not seen Children Who Chase Lost Voices/Journey to Agartha!(or perhaps you did and liked it, in which case fair play to you!)
It was an amazing movie for me. It’s a fail attempt to replicate Spirited Away but the world of Agartha was intriguing enough to forgive its shortcomings.
I’ve seen Children Who Chase Lost Voices and I liked it…
I’m right there with you. Mamoru Hosada is another one where (so far) everything he’s directed has been in a range of fun and watchable to pure gold. RIP Satoshi Kon – another true master.
Given they were in theaters (at least arty theaters) concurrently, what’s the under/over on how many people went to see Call Me By Your Name and instead saw Your Name or vice versa and were very confused?
Your Name was one of the best “you have to see it on the big screen” experiences in the past five years. Looking forward to this one as well.
Should also be noted that RADWIMPS (the band who did the soundtrack for Your Name, and yes that’s their real name) did the soundtrack for Weathering with You.
Both are quite good, even though it’s kinda rare for a band to create a whole soundtrack (i.e. usually the songs and the score are made by different people).
I saw this a few months ago after it got submitted for Animated Feature. Loved it instantly. Between the animation (raindrop fish!), the love story, and just the sheer fantastical scale that Shinkai brings to the medium, it was just a wonderful film from beginning to end. Even my girlfriend – who is indifferent to cartoons and outright hates anime – wanted to see it again and “Your Name” afterward.
I saw this at TIFF. It feels like Makoto Shinkai is a Lucas type who gets the tone and vibe right but just can’t write a believable romance. Unfortunately both his movies are so strongly tied to love stories that it is hard for me to give unabashed praise. Plus he includes some really childish, male gazey aspects that are really off putting. I gave them a pass in Your Name because it is a body swap movie but they really have no place in a movie like this.
Beautiful film. I had this in my Oscar nomination pool. The Academy went with Klaus instead…Having only ever awarded Spirited Away (almost 2 decades ago) this is a genre they don’t seem to really appreciate at all.
I’m still mad at the Academy for passing on Your Name. The trouble is that the Oscars are political, and a film’s American distributor can sink or swim its chances. That’s why Disney is almost always a lock to get at a nomination, regardless of the actual quality of the film. Japan’s animation industry needs to up its lobbying game.
Post-apocalyptic settings (or coming apocalypses) are such a common refrain in anime that it doesn’t surprise me the way it’s dealt with here. Some anime deal more directly with the causes/consequences, while others simply use it for settings. Tokyo’s probably been destroyed more in anime than New York has in movies.I felt like Your Name went off the rails in the back half and was less enthused by it than others, especially after the timeline reveal. That makes a little cautious here. I don’t mind the movie switching to an action flick inb back the half, but I hope it remains more narratively focused than it’ predecessor, which I felt introduced a few too many wrinkles and plot twists near the end.Either way, Shinkai’s works are always beautifully aimated and great eye candy.
Damn, I’m going to miss this via it’s Fathom Events simulcast; it’s tonight (1/15) and tomorrow (1/16) and both nights I’m busy with something else. Fuck.
Saw this last night as part of a double bill. Initially, I struggled with how I felt about this film, especially considering the bleak ending. I tend to find characters who choose the needs of the few over the needs of the many myopic and frustrating, and it didn’t help that I watched this directly Your Name, which ended on such a high. Not to spoil anything, but having to accept that this was the Tokyo that film shared? Frustrating to say the least.But the more I thought about it, the more I realised…perhaps that was the point. I’m a young adult now, I view things with a more collectivist approach, but I have grown up as part of a generation expected to sacrifice our short-term desires to save a planet we had no part in destroying. Why is this the burden the Weather Children – and us by extension – have to carry? I think that even though it’s not necessarily a straight up allegory for climate change, it works as one. On a superficial level, I didn’t find this as emotionally poignant as Your Name, or even some of Shinkai’s other, more insular works, (and I can blame some of the random tonal shifts for that, like the police chase for example…)…but I still believe it’s an absolutely fantastic film and the animation is near unrivalled. Would love to watch it again, sadly probably never will again in theatres but I’m just grateful I got to experience it on the big screen the first time around.
I was fortunate enough to see it last night (Jan 15th) in a fan screening event. It is no exaggeration that Shinkai is a master in his craft.I’ve also been very pleased to see that in more recent years, his signature theme in the features he’s directed seems to have evolved from “heartbreak/broken dreams” into “star-crossed love”. Don’t get me wrong, I love his work, but watching some of his earlier work like Voices of a Distant Star, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, The Garden of Words, and especially 5 Centimeters Per Second, make me want to grab the guy in a big bear hug and ask him “who hurt you?”I mean, my God, it’s been a while since I rewatched 5 Centimeters, but isn’t the takeaway message from that “the people you love might love you, but might not love you as strongly, and might grow apart from you, and you might not be able to move on, and before you know it you’ve wasted half your life waiting on someone who’s moved on without you, and while they’re happy and secure and forgot about you completely, you’ve become a bitter, broken husk of a person.”“Also there’s a rocket launch in the middle and a different girl who likes you but you’re too wrapped up in your remains of your previous relationship to notice.”
If you’ve seen one Makoto Shinkai film, you know the contours of the plot to most of them. That said, I really enjoyed seeing this last night. The animation and backdrops are so lovingly and intricately crafted.
When the future comes we’ll have moved on to imagining some other apocalyptic scenario. Or likely we’ll still be predicting this one.
Saw this tonight at the AMC Times Square. My impression: gorgeous but dumb. All the iconic shots of Tokyo were rendered so clearly and powerfully, more real than the real thing. Rainbow fish were gorgeous. And it had the perfect conceit for showing sunburst after sunburst over that amazingly rendered Tokyo.But once the sunbursts stopped coming, it was a trudge to the end, and I stopped caring about the characters. Somehow the greater level of peril lowered the stakes for me.And to the guy above who loved the soundtrack — you and I have very different tastes.
Watched this last week. The ending was a little funny. “Thousands are dead and Tokyo is slowly sinking but hey at least we are together Hina!”