In 2016, writer-director Makoto Shinkai delivered a stone-cold anime masterpiece with Your Name, a soulful, witty body-swap romance that unfurled into something far vaster and more apocalyptic than we could have imagined from its light-hearted set-up. It is the toughest of acts to follow, and while Shinkai’s latest doesn’t quite reach Your Name’s sublime heights, it’s likely to cheer those who fell hard for that film.
Weathering With You will also feel reassuringly familiar. Once again, Shinkai immerses us in a Young Adult world, with all the emotional intensity and fevered inward focus you’d expect from a story about teenagers forced by circumstance into taking on responsibilities too heavy for their young shoulders. Protagonist Hodaka (Daigo) enters the frame covered in cuts and bruises, never explained but presumably the result of parental abuse, which has driven him to sleep rough in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Hina (Mori), the object of his affection, is an orphan who must care for her younger brother while contending with the potentially catastrophic consequences of suddenly becoming a ‘weather maiden’ of ancient legend, who can magically banish rain.
Takes some gorgeously surreal twists and turns, while also offering a grim vision of our not-too-distant future.
As with Your Name, Shinkai’s style is closer to the magical realism of Haruki Murakami rather than the full-blown fantasy of, say, Hayao Miyazaki (though Ghibli-heads will spot a number of little visual tributes to Miyazaki’s work throughout this film, from My Neighbour Totoro to Ponyo). His granular attention to detail is nothing short of astounding, whether depicting a water droplet clinging to an iPhone screen, or recreating the synthetic inflation of a Big Mac bun as it’s released from its carton.
Of course, Weathering With You goes supernaturally epic, too, keying into climate-crisis concerns with its relentless rainfall, exploding into destructive typhoons delivered by mountainous clouds in which, it’s posited, entire undiscovered ecosystems might live. It takes some gorgeously surreal twists and turns, while also offering a grim vision of our not-too-distant future as Japan’s capital eventually takes a diluvial turn for the worse.
However, the film does lack the narrative clarity of Your Name, with a middle act that needed tightening and a questionable moral which, if we’re reading it rightly, seems to blame the least culpable generation for today’s global-warming woes. It also ladles the perky J-Pop a little too thickly on the soundtrack, and overdoes its internal-monologue narration, which at times takes a turn for the hysterical. But such criticisms soon fade amid Weathering With You’s consistently overwhelming visual glory. It is one of the most beautiful films you’ll see all year, and deserves to go down a storm.