Weathering with You

As always, I commend the animation, it's really beautiful. The idea of incorporating the songs was also interesting, it sounded like an opening/ending for the beginning/end of the main character's life stages. The characters and their personalities were ok. So far so good, fine, not mediocre. But the script. Dear Lord, the script! Mr. Shinkai, please find someone else to write the scripts and stick to animating and directing, because you're just not very good at those scripts. Maybe the book is better, more coherent, makes more sense, but this was really bad. Weirdly disjointed, for a long time you're actually groping for what it's exactly about, and by the time it becomes somewhat clear, another theme has gotten mixed up in it. If it had been two different films, it would have been better. And then there was the ending! God, that ending! I haven't seen anything so stupid in a long time. [SPOILER] Three years of constant rain? And everyone's fine with it, especially things, their apartments that don't succumb to mold, corrosion, disrepair, the global order going under? Sure, after three years of rain, it would definitely be this sunny. Whoopee. [END SPOILER] And unfortunately I didn't enjoy watching it that much. I was actually kind of looking forward to it being over. (06/09/2021)

Despite my original intention, I am not going to start my commentary by comparing this movie to Shinkai's previous works (and especially the last one), but I will start with what makes this movie unique compared to his previous works. Well: what the movie definitely excels at is its excellent depiction of the struggles of precocious teenagers and the conflict the naive main heroes have with reality, as they discover that a 15-year-old kid does not just become a real adult overnight. More than once while watching it, I was reminded of reading Kafka on the Shore, where Murakami also managed to handle similar issues brilliantly. Shinkai deserves another notch for one of the most accurate treatments of everyday life in Japan I have ever seen in anime - Western audiences may not appreciate it as much, but I could not help but notice how even the Japanese audience in the room giggled at it, the unexpected care and attention to minute detail with which Shinkai depicts life in a familiar Tokyo, in an effort to capture reality as faithfully as possible, and it is remarkable that so many well-known companies gave their permission for product placement in the movie without any need for inventing fake company names. In addition, anyone who perhaps disliked the narrative ambiguity, entanglement and fatefulness in Your Name should consider watching this movie, as Weathering with You offers a much clearer, perhaps one could say civil, story that is more accessible to a wider audience than its predecessor (and I do not mean that as a criticism). On the other hand, Shinkai's trademarks that were present in his previous films - Tokyo, trains, melancholy, piano music, sunsets, rain - are of course present here too, and again, by the bucketload, with the weather even playing a major role. So how does it compare to Your Name in the end? There are many crossover points (the main character from the preceding movie even makes a brief appearance!), so the comparison is simply unavoidable, however Weathering with You surprisingly does not come out of the comparison badly at all. It is a very well crafted piece of work, but it does not have the "wow effect" of its predecessor, and while I believe that this may have been intentional to some extent, I also found the movie lacking in a more careful introduction of the characters' family backgrounds, especially that of Hodaka, and of a stronger catharsis at the end - Shinkai unfortunately laid out his cards about 10 minutes ahead of time, leaving the ending itself with nothing to surprise and impact the audience. The bottom line is - a movie that definitely stands on its own two feet and is well worth seeing, it just has the misfortune of following a very successful predecessor and the expectations were set damn high for it. A strong 4 stars. (Seen at Shinjuku Piccadilly, Tokyo, 8/2019.) (09/02/2019)

A romantic story about a 16-year-old boy who, after running away from home, falls in love an orphaned girl in Tokyo of about the same age who is able to stop the rain and call the sun on request, but she always pays dearly for it. Honestly, it's an incredibly beautiful film about the power of love, the desire for freedom and the strenuous struggle with life in a big city that gradually disappears under the water build-up. The film can also be perceived as a metaphorical commentary on extreme weather fluctuations, which have been increasing in recent times. The film’s only disadvantage is that it very much resembles the director's previous films, especially the film Your Name, which was more story-rich, mysterious and emotional. At times, it almost seems as if Makoto Shinkai wants to repeat his success after his previous hit, and so he uses the same formula again (a young couple in love who are connected by a magical fantasy ability) and again decorated the film with his favourite motifs (a busy metropolis, rain, trains, a soundtrack, an impending catastrophe, the risk of the fatal loss of a loved one), with the assumption that it will again. It obviously does work, but this time the result is a little more transparent and straightforward and the drama must be replaced artificially, most often through various police chases. The ending could have been much longer and more surprising. Even so, Shinkai reaffirms his position as a master in working with details and poetic images, with dialogues, in faithfully capturing the environment and with a narrative that can grab the heart in the right places. (10/21/2019)

As I personally wasn't blown away by Shinkai's previous highly successful work, I approached Weathering with You with a reserved attitude thanks to the reactions around me, and probably enjoyed the film more than I would have expected because of that. Where anime manages to captivate me with an unrecognized intensity compared to other styles is in those beautiful, sweeping images with breathtaking detail and harmony. I would rechristen Shinkai the best anime documentarian because his worlds are breathtakingly captivating, perversely perfect, meticulously scripted, and to the satisfaction of us all, he doesn't want to stop for a moment! There isn't a scene where the camera doesn't, at least for a moment, pan to the drops on the windowsill or turn the clouds into a woozy model. The whole film is drenched with water in all its various states from beginning to end, until I forgot what was actually happening on the screen. And perhaps good for Shinkai, because while he's a very capable director, on the other hand he's an incredibly stubborn screenwriter. The story had a solid, weighty beginning and was sailing along until we encounter the main element of Shinkai's classic magical realism: the main couple's relationship interwoven with a dose of the supernatural. The "happy" part didn't brim with any deeper substance and failed to buy me enough. There's not enough smiling and sunshine being doled out, the other characters' side stories don't have the strong grounding and continuity with the main one that I would have liked, and then when it comes to resolving that oh-so-unhealthily over-plotted conclusion and denouement, it has all the pull of an engine running at half speed. I liked the idea of using Hina's powers, but this plus was more than outweighed by the over-repeated allusions to age, which ultimately felt like more of a hindrance than the cranky weather. We're not on supernatural levels, are we, so why, why? The conclusion was a decent smattering of odd decisions by several characters, so I appreciated the finish afterwards in the form of a return to magical scenes to soothe the soul. For this alone, I'd recommend Shinkai leave the script to someone else, as it's the last (and huge) march to the very top for me. Oof. And I'm going to pat myself on the back for managing to comment on this without comparing it to the very similar Your Name. A weaker 4 stars. Tokyo is scary (04/27/2020)