Other times, I freakin' love it.
Makoto Shinkai doesn't have the same universal recognition as someone like Hayao Miyazaki, but over the past several years, he's quietly become one of Japan's most respected animated storytellers. - right up until it became a lot less quiet when his smash hit Your Name became the highest-grossing film in Japanese box office history back in 2016. As a follow-up, his staff of animators (comprised of long-time collaborators as well as an influx of ex-Studio Ghibli veterans who helped make Your Name such a visual stunner) delivered a film with a familiar dose of magical realism that leans way close to the former than the latter as the film goes on. However, there's an edge to Weathering With You that sets it apart from Shinkai's other features even as it shares his usual strengths.
The film begins with Hodaka Morishima (Kotara Daigo), a 16-year-old runaway, arriving in Tokyo during a summer of seemingly never-ending rain. Underage and with no ID, job prospects are few until he catches a lucky break with a low-rent urban myths magazine that needs clerical help. The rag, run by the disreputable but soft-hearted Suga (Shun Oguri) and his assistant Natsumi (Tsubasa Honda), is pursuing a local legend about a "sunshine girl" who brings elusive clear weather for short spells during this freak rainy season. This person just so happens to be Hodaka's chance acquaintance Hina Amano (Nana Mori) - who can, in fact, cause clear sunny skies just by praying, but doing so may come at an ever-increasing cost.
Look, Your Name was a movie where the "strangers swapping bodies from hundreds of miles away" genre weirdness was the stuff that they put above the fold, so.
The movie deliberately places oppressive challenges the the characters' paths, especially early on, so that even small triumphs like an unexpected hot meal are felt viscerally, and stretches of progress and comfort feel deliciously earned. Shinkai's rich visual sensibilities, specifically in his super-realistic backgrounds and attention to environmental detail, submerges the viewer in the experience so that the radiant colors and the use of light is like slipping into a warm bath from the cold wet of the ever-present rain. Climate change is not an unfamiliar theme to Shinkai, but this film is built on it deliberately, and while the narrative is only explicitly about how our children are going to deal with the state of the world we've left for them somewhat later in the story, it sets up and knocks down emotional beats intimately so the audience feel it as much as the characters do, especially when one of the big needle drops hits (this is another collaboration with J-rock group RADWIMPS, and the songs are "bops," as the youths say).
Weathering With You is a banner example of Shinkai's predilection for loveable casts of hapless characters who stumble on every third step toward their goals. It's all about celebrating those tiny victories, like making friends with your crush's brother or helping a buddy have a nice day at the park with his daughter, stopping yourself from smoking that cigarette or finding the perfect birthday present. These seemingly unconnected strands begin to reveal themselves as carefully woven threads of the bigger narrative, with half-forgotten details revealed as deliberately planted as thefilm escalates. These small moments cascade into each other until they build to huge moments as characters come together and to each other's aid in deeply satisfying ways during apocalyptically unseasonable weather, police pursuits, and moments of self-sacrificing nobility. The film is almost achingly humanist in how lets us in through the window to these characters' lives, and retains that (and its oddly hopeful quasi-fatalism) during a finale of quietly epic proportions.
Weathering With You is about how the youngest generation has already been made to sacrifice too much for a world that is throwing them away, and how - rather than ask them to be grist for the mills to maybe put things back the way they used to be - they should take care of themselves and figure out how to live in the broken world we've left them.
And bring what sunshine to their lives that they can.
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