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I can see why some animation fans revere writer/director Makoto Shinkai (“5 Centimeters Per Second,” “Garden of Words”) as the next big thing in Japanese animation. Shinkai’s 2016 body-swap fantasy “ Your Name ” was understandably his big international breakthrough: a cheery, engrossing, and, best of all, representative work that shows his knack for drawing viewers into the emotional life of his teenage protagonists. “Weathering With You,” Shinkai’s latest animated romantic-fantasy to be released in America, has the same spark of ingenuity and consistency of vision as his earlier work. Which is especially impressive, given that “Weathering With You” feels much bigger conceptually—two poor, but optimistic runaways fall in love while trying to stop a monsoon-like rainstorm in Tokyo using her supernatural, cloud-dispelling “sun girl” energy—than it does on a narrative level.

I didn’t care much about how plucky high school dropout Hodaka ( Kotaro Daigo ) and his mysterious love interest Hina ( Nana Mori ) ultimately get together, but I enjoyed following them while they figured things out for themselves. You might also want to follow Shinkai and his animators given how vivid their conception of Hodaka and Hina’s lonely, but romantic world is. Shinkai’s brand of peppy magical realism is attractive, and “Weathering With You” is a perfect entry point for animation fans who are still looking for the next big Pixar or Hayao Miyazaki .

Hodaka and Hina’s richly detailed environment is also probably the thing you’ll remember most about “Weathering With You,” a compelling fantasy with a generic conclusion. Most of movie’s story is told from Hodaka’s point-of-view, which gives Shinkai’s latest a familiar trajectory: boy flees from home without a plan, quickly runs out of money, looks for shelter, makes new friends, evades the cops (and child protection services), and falls in love. Still, it’s refreshing to see Hodaka’s world isn’t just a reflection of his mood: the overcast sky and constant rain that overwhelm Shinkai’s Tokyo also reflects a world over-run by blank-faced adults who mark time before they’re allowed to go home and avoid the outside world.

Hodaka has to do some work on himself and his self-image in order to overcome the city’s general indifference. Falling in love and supporting Hina is part of that journey, though it’s not the most important part until midway through the film. Before then: Hodaka’s relationships are defined by how little money and therefore status he has. Even Keisuke Suga ( Shun Oguri ), a penny-pinching clickbait journalist and the first friend that Hodaka makes in Tokyo, immediately exploits Hodaka’s kindness: Keisuke shamelessly accepts a full meal from Hodaka after he saves Hodaka from falling overboard (they’re both traveling to Tokyo on a ferry). Hodaka also makes far less pay than he deserves after he goes to work for Keisuke’s tabloid-style website, though Keisuke at least offers him food and shelter.

Hodaka has to sell out a little at this early stage in his adult life, but he doesn’t have to like it. He mostly does, though, and it’s to Shinkai’s credit that we can see why. Hodaka’s constant fears—of being arrested for vagrancy or too broke to support himself—are gently (but constantly) undercut by the re-assuring sounds of subway trains softly passing over elevated tracks, commuters splashing through slow-rippling puddles, and even a paper coffee cup as it’s gently set down on a McDonald's counter. This is Hodaka’s new home, and it’s generally more reassuring than it is alienating.

Hodaka’s love for Tokyo predictably only grows once he finds Hina, though it’s a little annoying to see them meet-cute outside of an unsavory nightclub that he naturally tries to save her from working at. Hina soon shows Hodaka that she can take care of herself and then some. It’s also annoying to see her primarily used as a mirror to reflect his anxieties and hopes for the future. Hina has the supernatural ability to temporarily stop a Biblical rain from sinking Tokyo, if only for a couple of hours. But somehow, she’s his foil? That aspect of “Weathering With You” is disappointing; Shinkai also doesn’t seem to care that Hodaka is basically using Hina’s powers for financial gain in the same way that Keisuke takes advantage of his eagerness to please.

But again, Shinkai and his collaborators’ ability to accentuate the positive is what makes “Weathering With You” mostly satisfying. His characteristically graceful use of computer-generated graphics to give already beautiful images more contouring and depth of field is one of many ways that he draws viewers into Hodaka’s world. It’s to Shinkai’s great credit that Hodaka’s story seems real enough while you’re experiencing it with him. “Weathering With You” may not surpass “Your Name,” but it is an exciting confirmation of Shinkai’s storytelling gifts. 

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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Weathering with You (2020)

114 minutes

Kotaro Daigo as Hodaka Morishima (voice)

Nana Mori as Hina Amano (voice)

Shun Oguri as Keisuke Suga (voice)

Tsubasa Honda as Natsumi Suga (voice)

Sakura Kiryu as Nagisa Amano (voice)

Chieko Baishô as Fumi Tachibana (voice)

Sumi Shimamoto as Mamiya (voice)

Sei Hiraizumi as Yasui (voice)

Yuuki Kaji as Takai (voice)

Ryohei Kimura as Kimura (voice)

Kana Hanazawa as Kana (voice)

Ayane Sakura as Ayane (voice)

Kana Ichinose as Sasaki (voice)

Masako Nozawa as Fortuneteller (voice)

Hidekatsu Shibata as Shinto priest (voice)

Ryunosuke Kamiki as Taki Tachibana (voice)

Mone Kamishiraishi as Mitsuha Miyamizu (voice)

Ryou Narita as Kazuhiko Teshigawara (voice)

Aoi Yuki as Sayaka Natori (voice)

Tani Kanon as Yotsuba Miyamizu (voice)

• Makoto Shinkai
• Genki Kawamura
• Noritaka Kawaguchi
• Kouichirou Itou
• Yojiro Noda

Art Direction

• Hiroshi Takiguchi

Character Designer

• Masayoshi Tanaka

Theme Song Performance

Animation director.

• Atsushi Tamura

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‘Weathering With You’ Review: Letting the Sun Shine In

In the latest from the director of the hit anime “Your Name,” two teenagers find mysterious rays of hope amid catastrophe.

By Manohla Dargis

The rain doesn’t simply fall in “Weathering With You,” an anime about love in a time of catastrophe, it gushes. The record torrent that pounds Tokyo throughout is relentless: It floods streets and homes, wrapping the city in a heavy blanket of gray. There’s beauty here, though, in the shocks of color like the red latticework of an Eiffel-like tower and umbrellas that, when seen from above, look like promenading flowers.

Every so often, a ray of sunshine pierces the gloom, illuminating a small urban patch. The first time you see the sun streaming, it’s in the company of the teenage Hina (voiced by Nana Mori), who rushes toward the beam as if pulled by a magnet. She finds its terminus on the roof of a derelict building, where the light spreads over bright green, nodding blooms and an incongruously placed red torii gate . A traditional structure found in or at the entrance of Shinto shrines, the gate often serves as an entrance to a sacred space.

Putting her hands together as if in prayer, Hina closes her eyes and steps through the gate, changing both herself and the story. She doesn’t travel over the rainbow, not exactly, but slips through a watery portal, landing on a green field atop a mushroom-shaped cloud. The apocalyptic resonance of this image , which invokes the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hovers like an omen. For now, though, Hina finds peace under a blue sky where fish soar and raindrops fall up, swirling like tadpoles. She’s bathed in light, but then also soon home, waking from a voyage or maybe a dream.

The Japanese writer-director Makoto Shinkai has a thing for dualities and a penchant for imaginatively blurring the divide between them. Much like his wistful hit “Your Name,” this movie centers on an adolescent boy and girl whose lives intersect, almost magically, and who mirror each other visually and narratively. In “Weathering,” the boy, Hodaka (Kotaro Daigo), is a teenage runaway who almost drowns soon after the movie opens. Once in Tokyo, he struggles to stay dry, find something to eat, a place to live, a way to live.

The story grows more intricate after Hodaka meets Hina, a sweet, friendly smiler with a younger brother and no adult support. The two soon hit on a scheme to sell Hina’s mysterious new gifts as a so-called sunshine girl, a figure who can summon the sun with prayer. In Shinto, the sun goddess Amaterasu is an important deity, but Hina’s realm is far more down to earth. Creating a website, she and Hodaka start selling her rays at a bargain rate, sharing precious light with the city’s grateful, sodden inhabitants.

Shinkai fills “Weathering” with bold leaps, narrative complications (the story jumps around in time, not always productively) and softly hued, filigreed backdrops that approach the photorealistic. The character design, by contrast, is more generic, conforming to the familiar stylized anime (and manga) look. Hina and Hodaka have heart-shaped faces with huge gemstone eyes, small noses and tiny, ductile mouths that open wide and comically wider. The characters’ personalities are filled in by the highly modulated vocal performances and by Shinkai’s animation, the discreet and bold choices that make their faces and physicalities pop.

The story flows like all the running water, particularly in its fast-moving first hour. As Shinkai briskly cuts from one image to another, introducing characters as he jumps from scene to scene, the story gathers momentum that escalates with a fired gun, a sleazy villain and a rush to safety. The pace is sometimes so rapid that you scarcely have time to look, much less admire the translucent sheen of a plastic garbage bag or the meticulous lettering on a beer can (“Since 1978”). That’s to Shinkai’s purpose. As streets, homes, rooms and faces hurtle by, a textured world emerges detail by detail, one that looks like life yet is also expressionistic.

“Weathering With You” loses its way with a diffuse ending that leans heavily on pop songs and includes a fatalistic shrug and a romantic deluge of tears. A late nod at climate change — a close-up reference to the Anthropocene — brings the story briefly into the bleak now.

This invocation of environmental catastrophe puts all the rain into new, unmistakable context. It also suggests that a lot of what happened earlier in the story may have been dreamed into existence by two impressionable young souls who, struggling to survive, found refuge in each other and wished the real world away. Whether they did or not, you know how they feel.

Weathering With You

Rated PG-13 for intimations of doom. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes.

An earlier version of this review misspelled the surname of an actor. He is Kotaro Daigo, not Dalgo.

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Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

‘Weathering With You’: Film Review

Makoto Shinkai follows up his hit anime 'Your Name' with this meteorological meet-cute, in which a boy falls for a girl who can control the weather.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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In Texas, there’s a saying that goes, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes.” All the way over in Tokyo, changing the forecast doesn’t come nearly so easy — and may even require a human sacrifice to set things right — or at least, that’s the premise of “ Weathering With You ,” an inventive romantic fantasy from director Makoto Shinkai , whose 2016 hit “Your Name” became the first anime made by someone other than Hayao Miyazaki to earn more than 10 billion yen (or $100 million) in Japan. Here, a young couple desperate to stay together find themselves contending with all manner of meteorological freakery, with spectacular, if somewhat difficult to follow, results.

As in the body-swapping sensation that preceded it, “Weathering With You” blends the emotional concerns of 21st-century teens with elaborate supernatural elements, making for a visually dazzling, narratively convoluted adventure that speaks to the younger generation, but not necessarily the world at large. While it’s exciting to see a non-Ghibli-associated talent emerge in the domain of Japanese animation, there’s a great deal that simply doesn’t translate to American audiences, who may have trouble swallowing the film’s outrageous ending and its J-poppy Radwimps score.

Even so, GKIDS has ambitious plans for the film, which has earned a by-no-means-unimpressive $125 million since its July 19 release in Japan, and which kicked off the L.A.-based Animation Is Film Festival last October. GKIDS will release “Weathering With You” on Jan. 17 in the States, following two nights of fan preview screenings around the country.

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The tragic impossibility of true love is once again the director’s secret ingredient, as a 16-year-old runaway named Hokoda (Kotaro Daigo) falls for Hina (Nana Mori), a so-called Sunshine Girl, an exceptionally rare specimen with the power to pray away the gray skies. Her gift comes at a cost, however, and both teens realize that eventually, her ability to tame the weather will reach its limit, and she’ll levitate up into the clouds to be vaporized. Or something. (I’ve watched “Weathering With You” three times, and I still can’t make sense of the story or its arcane rules.) The point is, by the movie’s own mythology, Sunshine Girls aren’t long for this earth.

In the real world, of course, humans have zero control over the weather. Neither do filmmakers, which would make it hard to tell a story that calls for such extreme fluctuations between rain and shine via live action. On the other hand, by working in animation — specifically, a tech-forward approach in which tablets and digital tools are used to mirror the figures and style of classical hand-drawn anime — Shinkai is free to play God, conjuring whatever kind of weather patterns his story requires while dazzling us with his usual attention to lighting and landscapes.

One of Shinkai’s more impressive signatures, dating back at least to 2007’s “5 Centimeters per Second,” involves the awesome illumination of outdoor vistas in which the sun breaks through shadow and traces its way across the screen, like a theater curtain raising to reveal the world in all its splendor. Hina has the ability to make that happen, although the movie takes a while to introduce her ability, focusing first on young Hodaka.

Escaping the island where he grew up for what he imagines to be a more exciting life in Tokyo, Hodaka is standing on the deck of a ferry boat when a storm materializes directly overhead, hammering down so hard, the flash flood nearly casts the boy overboard. Instead, he’s rescued by Mr. Suga (Shun Oguri), a not-entirely-legit magazine publisher who gives Hodaka his card and, later, a job, after the kid realizes that he’s too young to get work in the big city. TV weather reports make it clear that Tokyo has been plagued by massive rains lately, and the newscasters don’t know what to make of the “fafrotskies,” or fish-like objects and strange jelly left behind by the storms. (No explanation ever comes, although we can assume Shinkai is riffing on the erratic impact of global warming.)

Countless filmmakers have offered their view of Tokyo, but Shinkai has a unique sense of the capital, and one of the movie’s more unexpected pleasures is seeing the metropolis through his eyes. From crowded neon-lit intersections to private rooftop shrines, the director captures many facets of the famous city, encompassing both the macro (fireworks over Meiji Jingu Gaien Park) and more intimate details (like the pleasures of a vending-machine feast). Hodaka meets Hina at a nondescript McDonald’s, where he finds a gun left behind by another customer, later using it to defend her from what looks to be a pimp.

Shinkai doesn’t provide enough background on either of the characters (why Hodaka leaves home, why Hina agrees to sex work), and yet, audiences will have no trouble accepting that they’re meant to be together, finding it easy to root for the couple through some of the story’s stranger turns. For example, once Hina realizes that she can override the rain, she and Hodaka decide to start a business, where clients pay her to call out the sun for sporting events, street fairs and a simple family afternoon in the park. But that incident with the gun (a bizarre subplot by any measure) attracts the police’s attention, as does Hina’s ability to harness lightning in alarmingly violent ways, and before long, they’re on the run from the authorities.

This is where “Weathering With You” proves weakest, falling back on tropes seen far too frequently in kids movies (rescuing the mermaid from researchers in “Splash,” for example), instead of charting a fresh path. Shinkai hasn’t gone far enough into fantasy to excuse the enormous holes in his script, though he does a nice job of distracting us with details, going so far as to incorporate cameo appearances by Taki and Mitsuha, the lead characters of “Your Name,” in such a way that suggests that the films may be part of an extended “Shinkai-verse.”

If that’s the case, the last act of “Weathering With You” feels all the more extreme (spoiler alert: this paragraph reveals the film’s ending). Shinkai conceived the film on the premise that average folks don’t appreciate the degree to which their emotions are influenced by the weather, nor do they realize how their individual decisions, no matter how small, may contribute to global climate change. Here, rather than accepting Hina’s fate — her sacrifice restores the weather — the couple selfishly challenge nature, to the extent that Tokyo is left permanently underwater. Romantic? Sure, though it’s no better than Jack and Rose letting everyone on the Titanic drown just so they could wind up together. There’s gotta be a better solution.

Reviewed at Animation Is Film Festival (opener), Oct. 18, 2019. (Also in Toronto, San Sebastian, Tokyo, Palm Springs film festivals.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 112 MIN.

• Production: (Animated — Japan) A GKIDS (in U.S.), Toho (in Japan) release of a Toho Co., Ltd., CoMix Wave Films Inc., Story Inc., Kadokawa Corporation, East Japan Marketing & Communications Inc., Voque Ting Co., Ltd., Lawson Entertainment Inc. production. Producer: Yoshihiro Furusawa. Executive producers: Minami Ichikawa, Noritaka Kawaguchi. Co-producers: Wakana Okamura, Kinue Ito.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Makoto Shinkai. Camera: Ryôsuke Tsuda. Editor: Makoto Shinkai. Music: Radwimps.
• With: Kotaro Daigo, Nana Mori, Tsubasa Honda, Sakura Kiryu , Se Hiraizmi, Yuki Kaji, Chieko Baisho, Shun Oguri.

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‘Weathering with You’ Review: Shinkai Makoto’s ‘Your Name’ Follow-Up Is a Gorgeous Love Story About Climate Change

David ehrlich.

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Shinkai Makoto, the fiercely idiosyncratic anime filmmaker whose long-simmering career exploded into legend when “ Your Name ” became an international phenomenon in 2016, has always been infatuated with the environment. The likes of “5 Centimeters per Second” and “Children Who Chase Lost Voices” may not express the same ecological concern that courses through Studio Ghibli’s work, but few movies of any kind have ever devoted more energy to — or divested more emotion from — the worlds around their characters. From unknown alien planets to rural Japanese footpaths, Shinkai’s backdrops are so lush, saturated, and ephemeral that the space between characters is best measured by heartache. And that heartache always rises, lifting our eyes towards the heavens like the light from a distant star. If Miyazaki is obsessed with airplanes, Shinkai is compelled by the sky.

Shinkai has never been known to shy away from his favorite subjects, and so it was always just a matter of time before he looked up from his desk and decided to make a film that’s literally just about the sky — a film that elevates the environment into a character of its own. Already a massive hit in its native Japan (as well as the country’s official submission for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars), “ Weathering with You ” is nothing if not that film; from the very first moment of this stunningly beautiful, emotionally diluted metropolitan epic, the clouds are more than just a force of nature. They’re a portal, they’re a punishment, they’re what brings people together and keeps them apart. Here, the clouds are more intimately connected to human life than even the most extreme environmentalists would argue.

Of course, Shinkai fans know better than to expect him to make a clear, didactic parable about climate change; his stories tend to begin in a literal mode before the strain of distance pulls them apart at the seams, and narrative logic is sublimated into the stuff of pure feeling. “Weathering with You” is no exception. This may be a thoroughly modern fable about volatile storms and a young girl who has the power to stop the rain, but — for better or worse — it’s too soaked in raw teenage emotions to puddle into a simple tale about how we need to treat the Earth like we have a crush on it.

For a movie about the sky, “Weathering with You” is ironically one of Shinkai’s most grounded films — immediately more warm and engaging than “Your Name,” if not at all capable of delivering the same emotional payoff. Another romantically wounded yarn that starts with magical-realism before bleeding into fantasy, the film opens with a brief introduction to a Tokyo girl named Amano Hina (Mori Nana), whose dying mother is about to pass on to the other side. But Hina, sobbing at her mom’s bedside, is distracted by a pillar of sunlight that pierces through the clouds and points towards a Shinto shrine atop a derelict building nearby. Racing over to the Torii gate and praying for her future, Hina finds herself spirited away into a skybound dimension where her tears swim around her body like fish.

Back on terra firma, a very naïve 16-year-old runaway named Morishima Hodaka (Daigo Kotaro) barely survives a tempestuous ferry road into Tokyo. Unpredictable weather leads to volatile water, and the kid is almost tossed overboard before a sad-eyed stranger named Suga Keisuke (Oguri Shun) saves him at the last second. Alone and scared in the big city — where it’s poured every day all summer long — Hodaka might forget the warmth of kindness if not for the nice McDonald’s employee (Hina!) who spots him a Big Mac.

The twerp eventually moves in with Keisuke, and agrees to work as an indentured gofer at the scummy “National Enquirer”-esque rag he runs out of his apartment. His first assignment: Investigate rumors about “sunshine girls” who can stop the rain. That brings our nervous young hero to Hina’s apartment, where she lives with her whip-smart kid brother Nagi (Kiryu Sakura). In typical Shinkai fashion, it isn’t long before the three of them start a small, sweet-natured business in which they go around Tokyo and bring a patch of clear sky to any paying customers who need it for their wedding, cos-play event, or what have you (“Cool, let’s go make money with the weather!”). But messing with the skies, it turns out, also comes with another kind of cost.

As per usual with a Shinkai film, the first thing you notice about “Weathering with You” is how beautiful it is. Tokyo may be the most frequently animated of cities, but it’s never been drawn to seem as vibrant and alive as it does here. The megalopolis is always in motion, as people continue to go about their business despite the apocalyptic deluge. The gray pall that hangs over Ginza can’t dampen the extraordinary detail that Shinkai’s team brings to the district’s fancy interiors. Rain streaks down on the commuters bustling into Shinjuku Station. The Yamanote Line cuts through Shibuya in such a vivid way that it will feel like a memory to anyone who’s seen that firsthand; it’s still packed during rush hour, as no one seems ready to throw in the towel. Somewhere, the umbrella industry must be booming.

Shinkai’s characters are drawn to scale — their lives feel small, and at the mercy of an indifferent world. Hina and Hodaka are essentially just well-rendered archetypes who are trying to get by and maybe hold on to a ray of sunshine. She’s sweet and mousy and totally egoless about her powers; he’s anxious and delicate enough to sweat up his own rainstorm. Neither of them ever threatens to become more dynamic than the circumstances that bring them together, and it grows even more frustrating than usual that Shinkai’s male, emo gaze tends to keep Hina at a remove (a problem the body-swap antics of “Your Name” enjoyably addressed). Anime is rife with enchanted girls in peril and boys who will risk their lives to protect them, and this is no exception; the more that “Weathering with You” leans on the relationship between its leads, the more tenuous their bond starts to feel.

The supporting cast is able to pick up some of the slack. Shinkai relies on little Nagi for comic relief and the schoolboy — a precocious ladies’ man who’s already forgotten more about women than Hodaka will ever learn — earns many of the movie’s biggest laugh (Nagi’s absurd role in a third act jailbreak is so inspired that it leaves you hoping Shinkai will lighten up with his next film). Keisuke might be the most nuanced character of all, even if the movie seems reluctant to explore his disaffected sadness.

As Hina becomes more indivisibly connected to the sky and the weather above Tokyo goes haywire, the chaos is most engaging for how it might fall on Keisuke and his asthmatic young daughter. But Shinkai doesn’t seem all that interested in the details of that interpersonal drama, backgrounding such things in favor of a wild, numbing, skybound finale that conflates suicide with climate change as it weighs immediate personal happiness versus long-term human survival.

For most filmmakers, that might not be much of a debate, but Shinkai isn’t afraid to reckon with the primacy of what people need in the here and now. “We only exist between Earth and the sky for a short while,” a wise old man insists. Tokyo used to be a bay, and if the water rises to reclaim it, well… maybe we’re a little too attached to the world that we know. If you only see “Weathering with You” through a certain lens, then it can seem a bit conflicted about our stewardship of the planet. Should we just do what makes us happy, and trust that future generations will roll with the punches? Surely that can’t be it.

It’s not so simple. If the unmoored third act is emotionally inert and hard to follow, Shinkai manages to eke a sliver of clarity out of the confusion. By the time the film is over, the climate change question almost feels like a red herring in a story that hinges on how people will possibly weather the storm that’s already here. Humans can’t afford to pretend that we don’t have some control over the environment, but we also can’t afford to act like the environment has complete control over us.

“Weathering with You” screened at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival . GKids will release it in theaters later this year.

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Weathering With You wraps our climate crisis around a love story

The follow-up to your name is a disappointing romance and a relevant tragedy.

By Joshua Rivera

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Weathering With You is the latest film from Makoto Shinkai, the writer and director who shot to worldwide fame with 2016’s Your Name . Your Name was tremendous; it became the highest-grossing anime film at the time it was released. It was also the perfect distillation of Shinkai’s sensibilities: openly romantic, quietly profound, and every frame gorgeous. It’s tempting to compare Weathering With You to Your Name , since the films have many similarities. That feels unfair, though. Weathering With You is trying for something far more difficult. 

The film takes place in a Japan beset by near-endless rain. Under a perpetually gray sky, Weathering With You follows Hodaka, a teenage boy who leaves home for Tokyo with no real plan other than getting away and trying to make it on his own. He falls in with Suga, a tabloid writer who gives him a place to stay in exchange for being his assistant. Throughout, he keeps crossing paths with Hina, a girl who we learn has the power to summon sunshine with a prayer. 

Hodaka and Hina start a business, setting up a website where the denizens of Tokyo can request “the sunshine girl” come to their neighborhood so they can finally have a bit of blue sky for a day that means a lot to them: a wedding, a birthday party, a sporting event. Unfortunately, there is a price to pay for this, one that neither Hodaka or Hina are aware of at first — and it forces them to make a terrible choice. 

Makoto Shinkai’s films are easy to fall for. The director is fond of telling stories that intertwine light fantasy premises with overwhelmingly earnest love stories and, as Your Name shows, when both sides of that equation work together in concert, the result is intoxicating. Weathering With You does a poor job of balancing its supernatural weather story with its central romance. The former is far more compelling than the latter, largely thanks to it having a sense of subtlety the other lacks.

In Weathering With You, the climate apocalypse is already here, even though it’s never explicitly stated. It’s a story told almost entirely through the environment: buildings are overgrown with vines and greenery begins to creep into buildings abandoned by humans. Metal surfaces are beset with rust, and an overwhelmed sewage system leads to small floods everywhere. 

The world of the film is in a state of utter disaster, but that’s rarely acknowledged by anyone. Nothing seems like it’s being done, shy of the gifted girl who prays for sunlight. Things ultimately feel helpless, and yet the Tokyo of Weathering With You moves onward. 

There are real-world parallels to be drawn here, as Australian wildfires have raged for four months , a crisis that was both spurred by climate change and will ultimately result in further climate change. Strange, dramatic earthquakes are rocking the Caribbean . Record high and low temperatures are recorded yearly, as the time we continue to have a livable earth slowly starts to shrink. Doom is now mere background noise, unless you can’t afford to ignore it, because you are young, because you will be here. Because you will have to do something.

It’s true that the love story at the center of Weathering With You does not resonate when compared to its predecessor, but its tragedy is far more profound. In crossing paths with one another, Hodaka and Hina find out they can do something, and because they are young, because they don’t know any better, they only ever think of that something in personal terms. They can make money. They can make others happy. They can enjoy that happiness. But they also might lose each other if they keep wishing sunshine into the world.

In the end, they make a choice. It’s a choice the world has to live with, even though they don’t know it’s been made by two teenagers who must weigh the value of a blue sky and their feelings for each other. It’s not a fair one. The adults have let them down.

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Review: ‘Weathering With You’ wraps larger concerns in a surprising modern-day fable

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“Weathering With You,” his first feature since the record-breaking “Your Name” in 2016, confirms Makoto Shinkai’s place among the leaders of the new generation of anime writer-directors. In both films, Shinkai turns a seemingly ordinary juvenile romance into a magical-realist journey — and a meditation on real social concerns.

Hoping to find a more interesting life than his local high school offers, Hodaka Morishima runs away to a rain-soaked Tokyo. Impetuous and impractical, he’s brought very little money and forgotten the student ID card he would have to show to apply for a part-time job. He takes shelter in alleys and an all-night manga cafe to escape the ceaseless downpour. Fortunately, he meets two people who offer him lifelines.

Oddball Keisuke Suga saves Hodaka when he‘s nearly swept off the ferry in a storm, and gives him an under-the-table job researching articles for a two-bit occult magazine. While living on the streets of Shinjuku, Hodaka meets Hina Amano, a gentle orphan who’s trying to care for herself and her precocious younger brother Nagisa.

Hina’s modest demeanor conceals a legendary power. She is a Weather Girl, a modern incarnation of a shaman from the old fables. When Hina prays, the clouds part and sunlight pierces them — for a brief time. Using his web skills, Hodaka markets her talent. People hire Hina to gain a few sunny hours for a party, a wedding, a memorial service.

Success brings Hina, Hodaka and Nagisa happiness and more money than they’ve ever seen in their hardscrabble existence in the post-bubble Japanese economy. But their idyll proves short-lived. Hodaka is still a runaway whose family is looking for him; Hina and Nagisa are minors with no legal guardian. Their flight from the police forces them to make choices that lead to an unexpected conclusion.

“Weathering” is a luminously beautiful film. Shinkai’s artists capture both micro- and macroscopic: the wonder of a raindrop acting a prism, casting refractions onto the surrounding surfaces and the glow produced by light shining through clouds. Tokyo almost becomes another character in the film, and the light and water falling on the city offer a counterpoint to Hina and Hodaka’s actions. As he did in “Your Name,” Shinkai suggests that magic exists in the everyday world, if the viewer would only look for it.

Hodaka and Hina may lack the intelligence and resolve of Taki and Mitsuha, the mismatched couple in “Your Name.” But they’re engaging characters, and their adventures enable Shinkai to examine two dire problems many young people in Japan feel powerless to overcome.

Even if he had the necessary ID card, Hodaka couldn’t earn a living as a part-timer in Tokyo. He and Hina would remain stuck at the margins of society with little hope for advancement. The lifetime employment and comfortable salaries that characterized the postwar “economic miracle” in Japan are rapidly becoming things of the past. Increasing numbers of young men face limited prospects for financial security and marriage.

The constant rains that flood Tokyo in “Weathering” suggest a metaphor for global climate change. Like young people around the world, Hodaka and Hina are trapped in the warming, increasingly inhospitable planet previous generations have left them. Shinkai’s sensitive treatment of these real-world problems gives the fantasy of “Weathering With You” a thought-provoking edge many more lavish American animated films lack.

'Weathering With You'

In both Japanese with subtitled English, and dubbed English versions Rated: PG-13, for suggestive material, some violence and language Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes Playing: Starts Jan. 17 in limited release; with fan screenings Jan. 15 and 16

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Weathering With You review – thrillingly beautiful anime romance

A runaway teenager falls for a mysterious ‘sun girl’ who has the power to stop the rain in Japan’s highest-grossing film of 2019

M akoto Shinkai, the Japanese anime director dubbed “the new Miyazaki” after the huge success of Your Name , his swooning YA body-swap romance set against the backdrop of a trippy natural disaster, returns with another apocalypse-tinged, boy-meets-girl adventure. Weathering With You, full of overcharged teenage emotion, was Japan’s highest-grossing film of 2019. Like Your Name, it’s thrillingly beautiful: Tokyo is animated in hyperreal intricacy, every dazzling detail dialled up to 11, but it’s less of a heartbreaker.

During the wettest rainy season on record in Tokyo, 16-year-old runaway Hodaka, homeless and hungry, arrives from the sticks. In a fast-food restaurant, teenage waitress Hina gives him a free burger, and two patches of red flush across his cheeks adorably. (The animation of first love, its highs and humiliations, is gorgeous.)

Hina, it turns out, is a “sun girl”. Like weather maidens from mythology, she can bring a halt to the rain with a prayer. The pair start a business: weddings, school sports days, flea markets – if you need a dry spell, call.

Japanese, apparently, has at least 50 words for rain. The film gives us the cinematic equivalent. It’s everywhere: raindrops bouncing off umbrellas, ploshing into puddles on grey streets, or shining like diamonds on electricity cables. Each instance is a miracle of loveliness. And, as the rainy season drags on, it dawns on Hodaka and Hina that the fate of the world depends on her powers, but at a personal cost.

I’m not sure how far environmental catastrophes in Shinkai’s films reveal an anxiety about the planet. They may be there simply to ramp up the emotional intensity. Is that the end of the world coming? Or a teenager’s heart breaking? Same thing. Still, I remember watching Your Name with a heart-squeezing feeling. This movie didn’t leave the same impression; maybe second time around it doesn’t have quite the same impact.

Weathering With You is released in the UK and in the US on 17 January.

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• World cinema
• Asia Pacific
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Weathering With You is an intense sensual joy

Makoto Shinkai’s follow-up to his anime hit Your Name lives up to his reputation

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The visual realism in Makoto Shinkai’s anime feature film Weathering With You is nothing short of stunning. Shinkai’s follow-up to his international hit Your Name keeps the warm, bright visuals, but adds even more detail, to the point where it rivals Studio Ghibli’s films for richness. This is the kind of movie where sharp-eyed viewers can pick out the individual crimp marks on the end of squeeze-tube toiletries, or the tiny moss spots that give an aging sidewalk its texture. Metal signs have photorealistic rust streaks. A hotel rate card on an unremarkable background wall is so meticulously drawn, you can read the pricing structure for services. You can count the individual leaves on shrubs as the characters walk by. The setting feels almost excruciatingly real, like a vivid sort of reality-plus.

It’s also a movie about a magical girl who creates sunshine by praying.

The thematic clash between a sublimely rendered but familiar mundane world and an unknowable preternatural element defines a lot of the conflict in Weathering With You. There’s no villain in this movie, and barely anything resembling an enemy that can be faced or fought. There’s just a sense that neither of the protagonists entirely belongs in such a quotidian world. Shinkai’s version of Tokyo is too beautiful to feel entirely ordinary, but it’s still so thoroughly realized that it’s solid and fixed, in a way the characters never are. And to some degree, the world knows they don’t fit in this setting, and responds to them as implacably as nature always does.

The central story develops slowly. Sixteen-year-old Hodaka Morishima (Kotaro Daigo in the original Japanese version; Brandon Engman in GKids’ English-language dub) runs away from his isolated island home and arrives in Tokyo with a battered face and a carefully calculated budget. Along the way, he nearly has a serious accident, but he’s saved by a vaguely sketchy man named Suga (Shun Oguri/Lee Pace). Trying to live on his own in Tokyo, Hodaka finds he can’t get legal work without a student ID. As his savings dry up, he reluctantly renews ties with Suga, moves into his office, and becomes a gofer for his tiny freelance writing business, alongside Suga’s lively associate, Natsumi (Tsubasa Honda/Alison Brie).

Assigned to a project to write about urban legends, Natsumi and Hodaka run around Tokyo, chasing lurid supernatural tales that Hodaka contemptuously dismisses as “fantasy novel-like stuff.” But one confident psychic tells them a story that becomes relevant, about sunshine girls and rain girls, who are possessed by gods and can change the weather with their presence. For a seeming fable, the story feels unusually relevant: Tokyo is being battered with record-breaking, unseasonable rain, and its residents are eager for even a hint of sun. When Hodaka meets a teenage orphan named Hina (Nana Mori/Ashley Boettcher), who appears to be genuinely capable of breaking the clouds and ending the rain in a small area for a short period, he quickly suggests they go into business. Joined by Hina’s little brother, they set up a website and start selling Hina’s powers online, bringing quick bursts of sunshine to people trying to enjoy their outdoor fairs or weddings.

In a more American story, the idea of leveraging a spiritual blessing for financial gain would be horrific hubris, and would come at a terrible price. But Weathering With You is a much warmer, homier story, and one far more suited to Japanese culture. There’s a familiar metaphor at work in Hina’s “sunshine girl” powers, which draw on the Japanese obsession with youthful energy and good cheer. It isn’t hard to make the leap from Hina’s upbeat personality spreading light and warmth around her to the more literal sunbeams that follow her around.

That warmth is especially effective on Hodaka. Like Your Name , Weathering With You is a tragic love story about two young people gradually discovering their need for each other under strange, desperate circumstances. Weathering With You focuses more on Hodaka’s perspective; for all his independence in leaving home, he’s still shy and awkward, and Shinkai finds the humor in Hodaka’s delirious terror at entering a girl’s apartment for the first time, or trying to figure out how to declare his love.

And where Hodaka seems to desperately need Hina, to the exclusion of nearly everything else, Hina’s needs are more complicated, since she has a brother to look after, a job and household to manage on her own, and a gradually emerging price to pay for her powers. Where Weathering With You most falters is in Shinkai’s failure to make Hina much more than an idealized fantasy figure. She’s a polestar for Hodaka’s world, and a gift to Tokyo’s residents, but she isn’t much of a personality in her own right. The way she bears most of the story’s pain and pressure, while the focus is still on Hodaka’s yearning for her, can feel uncomfortably unbalanced.

Weathering With You also introduces a handful of strangely specific elements that it never fully explores, at least in the subtitled version. Hodaka is first seen with his face covered in adhesive bandages, as if he’d been injured. The natural assumption, given that he’s a runaway, is that he’s fleeing abuse at home, after some climactic incident. But when asked about his choice to leave home, he defers with a mild shrug of a statement about finding it repressive, and it never comes up again. Early in the film, Hodaka finds a loaded handgun, seemingly left in a dead drop for someone who hasn’t picked it up. The film never addresses who it belongs to, and Hodaka’s reasoning for hanging onto it, even after it causes him considerable trouble, is never fully articulated.

And Shinkai goes out of his way to establish Hodaka’s fascination with rain — that inciting accident at the beginning of the film happens because when he’s warned of a dangerous downpour coming, he runs into it, rather than away from it. Later, traversing the city behind Natsumi on her scooter, he raises his face to the rain in seeming bliss. And yet he never really talks about that part of himself, even in the face of a story that centers on the damaging and dangerous effects of rain, and the misery it brings an immense number of people.

But none of these threads matter much amid the movie’s heady, romantic sweep, which centers on the swooning emotions of young love. Hodaka and Hina have a ready-made Romeo and Juliet scenario going for them, in that they’re both underage, and most of the adults who notice them trying to live independently either try to exploit them or take them into custody. Shinkai never acknowledges that these kids might not be equipped to live on their own yet; he gives the story over fully into their perspective, where they have everything they need in each other, and just want to be left alone. The triumphant music of Japanese band Radwimps, which also scored Your Name , underlines that feeling of youthful, confident energy, with bursts of joyous uplift at key moments along the way.

And nothing in Weathering With You ’s minor flaws interferes with the film’s melancholy beauty, which particularly lands whenever Hina engages her powers. The film’s near-constant rainfall is as exquisitely rendered as its cityscapes or its cozy, overpacked, but well-organized rooms. Every falling drop of water has its own highlights and shadows, and the clouds look like they drifted in from a Maxfield Parrish painting. But the moments when the rain clears are magical, not just literally, within the story, but in their glorious execution. There’s a repeated image throughout the film, as someone holds a hand up toward the sunlight, and looks at how the light illuminates their skin and makes it glow. In those moments, the audience can almost feel the weight and heat of the sunbeams.

Weathering With You is clearly channeling anxieties about climate change, though Shinkai keeps the image metaphorical and spiritual rather than digging into the real-world causes. The environment is out of balance in Weathering With You , and while it threatens Tokyo with gray, miserable days and eventually with storms and flooding, it threatens Hodaka and Hina in a much more personal way. In a film so obsessed with the fine line between childhood and adulthood, and with the ways grown-ups oppress and control people on the wrong side of that line, the message about the next generation paying the price for this generation’s decisions about pollution is entirely clear. That makes Weathering ’s surprising, daring ending even more symbolic.

But while that ending seems ready-made for debate and discussion, and while it’s possible to pick the story apart and find some dubious elements, the real joy of Weathering With You is in the sensual pleasure of stepping into this world with Hodaka and Hina, and reveling both in their personal joys and in the more mundane ones of the world around them. This is the kind of film where viewers can let themselves flow with the film’s emotion, or entirely ignore the action and just get lost in the beauty of the imagination. Either way, it’s a luscious trip to take.

Weathering With You is in theaters now.

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‘weathering with you’ (‘tenki no ko’): film review | tiff 2019.

Top-grossing Japanese anime director Makoto Shinkai of 'Your Name' returns with another romantic fantasy film about a teenage girl who can control the weather in 'Weathering With You.'

By Deborah Young

Deborah Young

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A runaway boy from an island, Hodaka, and Hina, a city girl who has the ability to change the rain to sunshine, join forces in Weathering With You , Makoto Shinkai’s long-awaited anime follow-up to his 2017 Your Name . That smash hit, which became the second-highest-grossing anime film of all time after it topped $357 million worldwide, is a hard act to follow. But all things are relative: The new film has already grossed in excess of $100 million since it came out in July and is expected to top Disney’s live-action Aladdin to become Japan’s biggest theatrical release of 2019.

Weathering With You is also headed for the voracious Chinese market and is the country’s 2020 Oscar submission. GKIDS is handling North American distribution after its Toronto bow as a Special Presentation.

The Bottom Line Mostly sunny.

Once again, Shinkai takes sure aim at the teenage market and its taste for romance and magical realism. He works with many of the creators of Your Name , including producers Noritaka Kawaguchi and Genki Kawamura, animation director Masayoshi Tanaka who designed the characters in the earlier film and the Japanese rock band Radwimps for the bouncy, blasting score. All the pieces are in place for a charming tale of magical powers and the price of using them, and once again the ending revolves around an environmental disaster.

Adding it up, the film has the same charming characters and delightfully detailed pastel artwork of its predecessor, but in exchanging Your Name ’s sci-fi component for a mythical-magical story, it loses a bit of quota.

Hodaka (shrilly voiced by Kotaro Daigo) is an idealistic 16-year-old who runs away from his parents’ rural home and heads for Tokyo. He is on a ship about to be swept overboard by the typhoon he foolishly braves when a hand reaches out to grab him. Thus he meets Suga (Shun Oguri), the dashing, ironic editor of a magazine of weird tales who offers the penniless boy a job and a roof over his head.

Following the lead of Suga’s young assistant and possible girlfriend, Natsumi (Tsubasa Honda), Hodaka races around the city doing interviews with people who have had strange experiences worth writing about. Eventually he tracks down the orphan Hina (Nana Mori), a girl his age with pigtails and a gentle personality — and an uncanny ability to make it stop raining by praying. She soon becomes known as the Sunshine Girl and goes into business with Hodaka selling her power to people having weddings, family picnics or whatever else requires clear skies. It keeps food on the table for herself and her cute little brother Nagi (Sakura Kiryu).

Astounding aerial views of Tokyo vie with huge cumulus cloud formations in the sky when Hina does her tricks. In every instance, the thunderstorm clears away and rays of bright sunlight break through.

This fantasy of teenage omnipotence is countered by a warning, however: Hodaka learns that Hina’s powers are those of the mythical Japanese “Weather Maiden,” who was used in ancient times for similar purposes but who was actually a sacrificial victim. Part of her life force was used up every time she cleared the skies and let the sunshine in.

With this threat hanging over their heads, Hodaka, Hina and Nagi find themselves in new trouble because they are living without an adult guardian. Pursued by the police and the social services (shades of Shoplifters! ), they flee across the city seeking shelter from the incessant rain and cold. One of the film’s most exciting scenes, taken from action movies, is Hodaka’s daredevil escape through the streets of Tokyo on the back of a motorcycle driven by Natsumi.

This is a dark and frightening part of the film, in which fantasy dies and the stark realities of the adult world shake the defenseless young people. Hodaka proves his mettle as a fearless street fighter fixated on his goal of getting Hina back, whatever the cost. And Shinkai’s story does make him choose between dire options: the weather, or the girl he loves. Hodaka and Hina are given a trip to the clouds, where sky-bound poetry alternates with a frightening free-fall back to earth.

There is also an unmistakable environmental message for young audiences to embrace: Messing with nature has its cost. For Hina, who has been given her powers at a prayer shrine, nature is sacred. The music swells every time it looks up at the expressive, ever-changing sky with its freak weather, snow in August, flooded rivers, water bombs falling from the sky, pedestrians being knocked out by giant hail stones and a perfect storm that tears through buildings and ruins half the city. The incessant rain even threatens to turn Tokyo back into the bay it once was.

Perhaps the convention Westerners will find most difficult to adjust to is the way the dialogue is shouted with an explanation point, and Hodaka is especially irritating in his groaning gasps and hysterical demands. But the fast-moving story includes some finely conceived humor, like when Nagi’s elementary school girlfriends help him escape from child custody by switching clothes with him.

Production companies: Toho Co., Story Inc., CoMix Wave Films Cast: Kotaro Daigo, Nana Mori, Shun Oguri Director-screenwriter-editor: Makoto Shinkai Producers: Genki Kawamura, Yoshihiro Furusawa Executive producers: Minami Ichikawa, Noritaka Kawaguchi Director of photography: Ryosuke Tsuda Production designers: Hiroshi Takiguchi, Masayoshi Tanaka Animator: Atsushi Tamura Music: Radwimps Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentation) World sales: Toho Co.

111 minutes

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Movie Reviews

Who'll stop the rain she will: 'weathering with you'.

Ella Taylor

In writer/director Makoto Shinkai's latest animated feature, Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo, L) meets Hina (voiced by Nana Mori, R), a girl who can stop the rain. Gkids hide caption

In writer/director Makoto Shinkai's latest animated feature, Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo, L) meets Hina (voiced by Nana Mori, R), a girl who can stop the rain.

The premise of Makoto Shinkai's captivating new anime, Weathering With You , plays out just a whisker away from the storyline of his 2017 smash hit Your Name , about a teenage boy and girl who switch bodies, time and place. In both films a country boy moves to the big city and meets a mystery girl with special powers. Here the two, both refugees from less than adequate families, get caught up in a galloping plot of rescue, redemption and growing up, wrapped in a love story drawn from ancient Japanese legend.

In Your Name a comet threatened to take out a Japanese island; in Weathering With You (a title to make grammar pedants wince, though its target audience won't give a damn) Tokyo drips and sweats through a summer of unceasing torrential rain that frays the nerves of its residents and threatens to drag underwater a city that already lies below sea level, vulnerable to sudden storm surges. Climate change, drawn from hair-raising reality, plays a defining role here too.

Shinkai may be dipping his toes in his own pre-tested global market. But Weathering With You rises gracefully above its copycat blueprint, and not least because it offers a fresh vision of grungy urban beauty, shrouding the otherwise garishly lit city of Tokyo in a watery grey-blue palette featuring rising fog below and gorgeously menacing cumulonimbus formations above. With their saucer eyes and tip-tilted noses, our young heroes may look like standard issue out of Studio Ghibli, where Weathering 's animation director Atsushi Tamura once worked. But unlike the older generation of Ghibli directors like Hayao Miyazaki, who set his bold boys and girls down in enchantingly sunlit animated country towns with meadows of waving buttercups, Shinkai speaks to a more knowing middle-school manga demographic whose onscreen happy places are the seamier crevices of big cities.

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An innocent newbie with a Salinger novel tucked into his backpack, Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo) is a nerdy cipher of a boy who doesn't want to go home because "it's boring." It goes without saying that the movie's end goal is to grow him up under the tutelage of Hina, a far more knowing girl navigator of Tokyo's grimier interiors. She's the beguiling trainee witch from Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service , if you like, all grown up into a savvy burger-joint server shrouded in old-world mystery. Hina (voiced by Nana Mori) is energetic and practical, but she's also a work of the director's imagination culled from Japanese myth — a "sunshine girl" chosen by who-knows-from-up-there to carry a special skill. With mind rising above body, she can conjure a blue hole in the clouds and stop the rain with nothing more than a prayer, if only for a short while.

Together Hodaka and Hina make a resourceful power team, constantly adapting to the shape-shifting challenges of the inner city jungle as they go into business together selling Hina's gifts to those who need to clear the skies for special events. For added sweetness, Hina comes packaged with a little brother, Nagi, who's quite the ladies' man given that he hasn't hit his second decade yet. His success with girls in braids will come in useful when, in its penultimate chapter, Weathering With You turns into a hectic action movie, complete with a recklessly waving gun and a Vespa chase with another brazen hussy at the handlebars. A tributary plot involving Hodaka's boss drives home the populist message that even the villains of the underworld have their sunnier sides as unexpected rescuers.

For all their courage and newfound moxie, Hodaka and Hina's youth make them vulnerable to the authorities because they're doing things that are prohibited to minors. The thin thread that binds Hina, and all of Tokyo, to the volatile heavens threatens to break, and Hodaka must figure out how to man up enough to release his love from her age-old obligations as a human sacrifice. Weathering With You doesn't quite measure up to the haunting lyricism and youthful longing of Your Name . But the tragedy that looms over Hina and Hodaka, and Tokyo, and the planet, echoes the anxieties that plague a generation terrified and angry at the warming and wetting their elders have done their best to ignore.

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Weathering With You Reviews

This Japanese anime takes the every day concept and builds a relationship between two teenagers yet to fully understand this film you need a little knowledge of Japan and its culture.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 25, 2023

Shinkai's technical achievement is his precision in capturing small details of urban life, with visuals so sharp that you might mistake them for a photograph at first glance. Yet there's an intensity of color in his drawings that no camera could provide.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 14, 2022

Despite the catastrophic and even apocalyptic climate, Shinkai makes sure his world is shimmering in radiant colors, love and humanity shining through.

Full Review | Jun 4, 2021

Weathering With You may have too many elements in common with Your Name, but it's a gorgeous movie with magnificent visuals and music. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 16, 2020

Thematically, as much as it all may seem relatively light-hearted on the surface, Weathering With You delves into some darker and more mature themes. It's a difficult balance to maintain but for the most part, it succeeds.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 1, 2020

Just as mystical as Your Name. but not as affecting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 26, 2020

While Weathering With You may suffer from a bit of tonal whiplash across the runtime, it's an engrossing modern fable, thanks to the vibrant life that is given to this stormy, rainy, Tokyo.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2020

"Weathering With You" is another great anime by the latest master of the category, and a film that everyone will enjoy watching.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2020

...the need to belong and be loved are universal themes that Shinkai, an expert crafter of young, teenage love stories, explores very well in 'Weathering With You.'

Full Review | Jul 17, 2020

Although Weathering With You includes serious social issues about homelessness and the hazards of messing with the environment, ultimately this is a sweetly sentimental film where the biggest messages are about taking life-changing risks for true love.

Full Review | Jul 12, 2020

A film with a huge heart and a vivid imagination.

Full Review | Jul 6, 2020

[The] plotlines ... seem to be on different planes altogether ... the characterizations are lazy archetypes and many points of tension are artificial. I still enjoyed it[.]

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

Viewing this as a standalone film without all the comparisons, it's hard to deny the wonderfully charming chemistry between Hina and Hodaka.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 14, 2020

I love this movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.7/10 | Mar 13, 2020

It is hard for anyone in the Japanese animation industry to escape the legend of Miyazaki. But Shinkai is paving his own path and he expands on the success of Your Name with Weathering with You.

Full Review | Mar 2, 2020

Weathering With You also explores the myriad effects of climate change on our industrialized society, but I think its message is one of simultaneous resignedness and hope.

Full Review | Feb 21, 2020

Another essential slice of thumping, bittersweet genius from one of Japan's great modern anime auteurs.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 11, 2020

This is anime remixed with romance and rock opera ballads - much more of a confection than a social critique. Weathering With You is a typhoon-infused fantasy grounded in a tangible reality.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2020

This film's simply too soggy to live up to Shinkai's other films, box-office success be damned.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jan 30, 2020

Weathering With You does a poor job of balancing its supernatural weather story with its central romance.

Full Review | Jan 29, 2020

Weathering With You Review

17 Jan 2020

Weathering With You

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.

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Weathering with you, common sense media reviewers.

Charming, romantic, powerful anime fantasy has some edge.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Encourages teamwork and strong bonds between frien

Hodaka is caring and kind, brave and protective. H

Hodaka is nearly swept away by a storm that hits a

A 16-year-old is caught looking at young women's b

Occasional language includes one "a--hole," one "b

Despite being animated, there are several brands v

Adult characters occasionally drink and smoke ciga

Parents need to know that Weathering with You is a teen-friendly animated adventure from Japanese filmmaker Makoto Shinkai ( Your Name ). It follows 16-year-old runaway Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo), who finds a home and a job as a reporter in Tokyo, where he falls for beautiful teen orphan Hina …

Positive Messages

Encourages teamwork and strong bonds between friends -- looking after and protecting one another, being there through difficult times, celebrating happy times, etc. Also promotes inter-generational connections (Suga is like an uncle figure to Hodaka, and Natsumi an older sister type) and values the overwhelming nature of first (teen) love.

Positive Role Models

Hodaka is caring and kind, brave and protective. He's willing to put himself in danger in order to take care of Hina and her little brother. But he's also a runaway, and it's never explained why, at 16, he left home for Tokyo. Hina is courageous and thoughtful; she takes care of her brother and befriends Hodaka. But she's also keeping secrets about her abilities and her age. Natsumi and Suga watch over Hodaka when they can and give him a place to stay. The movie is based in Japan, so it represents Tokyo (city) culture.

Violence & Scariness

Hodaka is nearly swept away by a storm that hits a passenger boat, but he's rescued. He's beaten up a few different times (kicked, punched) in escalating armed confrontations -- by the strip club goons and also by the cops. He shoots a gun in two confrontations but doesn't hit anyone. He's bloody and bruised. The weather can get violent and eventually threatens Hodaka and Hina.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A 16-year-old is caught looking at young women's bodies a few times, and one character says "You looked at my boobs" twice (there are close-ups of her legs and cleavage). Teens share longing looks and hold hands. A young woman partially undresses, not for sexual reasons but to show that her body is magically transforming (the outline of her body is visible). There's a big crush and some romance; hugging and hand holding shown. Two men try to persuade a young woman to give their "sex club" a try because she'll get paid right away. Hodaka believes an older man and a younger woman are in a sexual/adulterous relationship.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Occasional language includes one "a--hole," one "bulls--t," plus "bastard," "brat," "stupid," "darn," "what the heck," "dummy," "who the hell."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Despite being animated, there are several brands visible in the movie: McDonald's, Yahoo! Japan, Apple products (iPhone, MacBook), Honda, Pepsi, and more.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adult characters occasionally drink and smoke cigarettes. A young woman snaps at her uncle that he "smoked a pack of cigarettes and got drunk." An adult offers a 16-year-old main character beer. One character is visibly drunk.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Weathering with You is a teen-friendly animated adventure from Japanese filmmaker Makoto Shinkai ( Your Name ). It follows 16-year-old runaway Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo), who finds a home and a job as a reporter in Tokyo, where he falls for beautiful teen orphan Hina (Nana Mori), who can magically change the weather when she prays. The movie (available either subtitled or dubbed in English) should appeal to manga-loving tweens and teens, especially those who enjoy romance with folktale/fantasy elements. Expect occasional language ("bulls--t," "a--holes," "bastard," "hell") and some suggestive material: Men want a teen girl to work at a strip club, a teen guy thinks a college-aged woman is an older man's mistress, and a young woman reveals her body under a robe (but it's transforming into water). The action/violence includes Hodaka getting bruised in street fights, shooting a gun to scare off those who are trying to hurt him, and a chase scene. Romance is mostly focused on an obvious crush, but not much more than an embrace and hand holding is shown. With themes of courage and teamwork, the movie also values the strong bonds between friends. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (7)
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Based on 7 parent reviews

What's the Story?

WEATHERING WITH YOU is a Japanese animated romantic fantasy about Hodaka Morishima (voiced by Kotaro Daigo), a 16-year-old boy who runs away to Tokyo and ends up meeting and falling for Hina (Nana Mori), a mysterious teenage orphan who's caring for her younger brother and can manipulate the weather. Hodaka nearly dies during a storm on his journey to Tokyo but is saved by Mr. Suga (Shun Oguri), who offers Hodaka his business card. After a sketchy time looking for work, Hodaka seeks help from Mr. Suga, who offers him room and board in exchange for housework and his reporting skills. With Tokyo suffering from too many days of rain, Hodaka is assigned a story about the legend of "weather maidens" -- girls who can supernaturally cause either sunshine or storms. Soon after, Hodaka realizes that Hina can pray the rain away and bring sunshine to areas around her. Hodaka helps Hina come up with a way to market her "Sunshine Girl" skills, but the more she does it, the more it becomes clear that there's a personal cost to her supernatural abilities. (An English-dubbed version of the film is available, but this review is based on the subtitled original.)

Is It Any Good?

Writer-director Makoto Shinkai has crafted another charming, visually impressive animated story that's both magical and romantic. This movie, like Shinkai's Your Name , is an exploration of friendship, family, and folklore, as well as a slow-burning first love story. There's also an underlying but not heavy-handed environmentalist message about the way weather can affect people and even cause disaster. Hodaka's coming-of-age plot burns brightest, as does the blooming romance between him and Hina. Irresistibly sweet and brave (if occasionally too courageous for his own good), Hodaka is easy to root for, even though Shinkai doesn't delve into the reasons he runs away from home.

The music includes soaring J-pop songs that are subtitled and nicely accompany major turning points in the movie. And the supernatural sequences are stunning with swirling storms and fires. Hina is portrayed as a special, beautiful force of good, and it's plain to see why she's a beloved older sister -- and Hodaka's crush. Fans of Japanese anime won't need much convincing to see Weathering with You , but it should also appeal to older tweens, teens, and adults who appreciate more mature animation.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about whether you prefer to watch foreign-language animated films in their original language with subtitles or dubbed into your language. What makes one more appealing than the other?

Who in Weathering with You do you consider a role model ? What character strengths do they display?

Discuss the romance in the movie. What do you think about the way the relationship between Hodaka and Hina progresses?

What are the movie's messages about friendship and family? What do you think about how the movie ends?

Movie Details

• In theaters : January 17, 2020
• On DVD or streaming : September 15, 2020
• Cast : Nana Mori , Kotaro Daigo , Sei Hiraizumi
• Director : Makoto Shinkai
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : GKIDS
• Genre : Anime
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters , Friendship
• Character Strengths : Courage , Teamwork
• Run time : 111 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : suggestive material, some violence and language
• Award : Common Sense Selection
• Last updated : August 2, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Weathering With You - Review

Shinkai's newest film once again showcases the turbulence of youth in a beautiful setting..

For years, Makoto Shinkai has been obsessed with a singular vision: how do I capture the optimism and beauty of youth across distance and time? It started with Voices of A Distant Star, a movie about a girl who reaches out to her childhood friend via text messages as war rages over the planet. From there, Shinkai worked on The Place Promised In Our Early Days before moving on to 5 Centimeters per Second, a film that secured his name amongst some of the up and coming directors post-Ghibli era. After the short and sweet Garden of Words, it was clear: the director had established his brand of romantic drama. Finally, in 2016, he released the blockbuster Your Name, which came out and took the world by storm, becoming the highest-grossing anime film of all time . Your Name wasn’t just a phenomenon, though. It was also a clear statement that Shinkai had finally found his rhythm, pairing the blossom of young romance to emotional and inspiring music from the band RADWIMPS.

Now, nearly four years later, Shinkai’s latest film, Weathering With You, has landed on western shores. For those wondering if the film rides off the success of Your Name, I can confidently say that it does indeed replicate much of what made that film so enjoyable, but with enough adjustments and variations for any Shinkai or anime fan to enjoy wholeheartedly. On the flip side of this coin though, Weathering With You also bears traditional Shinkai’s faults; there are plot contrivances, the characters are still very superficial in their personality and growth, and some of the emotional beats still feel far too rose-colored to be appreciated in depth.

One of Weathering With You’s greatest strengths is the weight of Tokyo’s identity. Shinkai takes great care to paint the setting in every visceral stroke possible, whether it’s from the muted honks of cars zooming through the tight lanes between skyscrapers, the nonstop chatter of adults in cafes and shopping districts, or the absolutely overwhelming clutter of signs and lights in local shops and menus: Tokyo feels alive, real, and as much a part of the film as the actual characters. Even when much of the city is overcast with cloudy skies, there are enough details to carry over the presence of a rainy day. Umbrellas get shaken out by crowds, and streams of droplets fall on the window panes as city-goers trud through mud and wet pavements with their rubber boots. Throughout the film, I felt like I was there with the characters, in the cold, wet and miserable rain.

This is important because Weathering With You is equally about Tokyo as it is about the romance that buds between protagonists Hodaka and Hina. Much of Shinkai’s questions about love and distance are now focused on a singular perspective: can youth blossom in the fast-paced, ever-changing and brutal reality that is Tokyo? In its apathetic crowds, shady businesses, and unconventional ways of making a living? The answer, without spoiling, is an ethereal one, but no doubt: Shinkai has much to say about the current way of life in Tokyo, and does a fantastic job of weaving it with Hodaka and Hina’s story.

Weathering With You takes a step back from the mysticism and instead chooses to focus more on the nuance of forcing yourself into adulthood.

Which brings us back to the main thread that binds Hodaka and Hina. If Your Name is a film that explores the red thread of fate, Weathering With You takes a step back from the mysticism and instead chooses to focus more on the nuance of forcing yourself into adulthood. That’s not to say that the movie has its fantastical moments, but the drive of Weathering With You isn’t necessarily myths or prophecies about the power to change the weather, but rather, the desperation of youth trying to live a meaningful life when the city and others consistently try to take so much from them. It’s a far more serious plot than Your Name and is what colors Hodaka and Hina’s relationship into something more realistic than just a fated union. This is a story about teenagers who want to find a life in a city that simply won’t let them have one. As a result, Weathering With You is a moodier film, but sometimes, a better one because of it.

That’s not to say the film doesn’t have its bright moments. RADWIMPS continues to make their mark: their orchestral soundtrack fits perfectly with the tempo of the film, ranging from simple piano melodies for quiet, introspective moments, to melancholic love songs that play in the background as Hina and Hodaka chase across bridges and weather. Out of all the tracks, “Great Escape” is clearly the strongest, and played in a way that easily took my breath away. Shinkai has not lost his touch for the dramatic moments of life, and while Weathering With You doesn’t have as many of them as I’d like, it’s got enough to pack a punch when it needs it most.

Many of these sweeping theatrics rely on the stunning animation and composite you come to expect in any Shinkai film. In Weathering With You’s case, Shinkai truly manages to make water feel everchanging and powerful, as much of the movie is about the rain and how weather changes our perception and mood. As a result, there’s a lot of meticulous attention on how light, shadow, and color all work together to change the setting in such a way that it really reflects the atmosphere of the current scene. Shinkai’s “painting-like” aesthetic is really felt in the urban setting, and the art direction is strong and cohesive enough that even a single water drop feels alive and vibrant on its own.

All of this sounds beautiful, and it’s true: much of Weathering With You is pleasant and evocative. But it also still suffers from Shinkai’s trademark issues: characterization and pacing. Hodaka barely grows as a character, so his relationship with Hina feels forced and superficial. Side characters do feel far more interesting in personality, but aren’t given enough time to become fleshed out or balanced in their relationship with Hodaka. The ending feels abrupt compared to the slow build and climax, and many of the movie’s light-hearted moments don’t feel strong enough to counterbalance a lot of the movie’s melodrama. Many plot contrivances appear towards the end of the film, and some things are wholly left unexplained.

Despite these bumps in the road, Weathering With You is still a self-contained film that manages to hit all the buttons of what makes a Shinkai film so endearing, captivating, and stunning. It’s not his most polished work by any means, but if you enjoy a good dose of teen drama and romance, the film has plenty to offer. It wears its heart enough on its sleeve that its shortcomings can be swept under the rug to make for an enjoyable film that captures the frustrations and longings of youth in the current generation, while also serving as a beautiful tribute to the busy world of Tokyo.

The Verdict

Weathering With You still marks Makoto Shinkai as one of Japan’s finest directors when it comes to artistic vision and capturing the essence of turbulent, romantic youth. But it’s also safe to say that Shinkai’s formula, while tried and true to success, may also seem like an all too familiar territory for folks looking for something a little different.

Weathering With You

Weathering with you review.

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Review: “Weathering With You” Is a Giant Allegory for Climate Change

Makoto Shinkai delivers a touching love story with dire warnings for humanity's future.

By Richard Yu , 11 Aug 19 23:44 GMT

In 2016, Your Name brought smiles and tears to audiences around the world with its story about a teenage couple separated by space and time. The film’s acclaimed director Makoto Shinkai is back with his long-awaited feature Weathering With You , another anime movie that bounces between romance, sci-fi, and fantasy.

As Weathering With You ’s name suggests, weather plays a big role in the story—the film is set in a near-future Tokyo experiencing an unprecedented summer rainstorm.

We’re quickly introduced to our main characters: teen-aged Hina, orphaned with her kid brother after her mom died, is a so-called “sunshine girl”—a legendary girl who can cast away the rain simply by praying. We also meet Hokada, a runaway from a remote island who tries to survive on Tokyo’s streets. 

Hokada’s first couple of days on the streets are rough. Because he is underage, he can’t even find a job in Tokyo’s notorious water trade , let alone more legitimate work. He ends up calling Mr. Suga, a man he met on the ferry ride to the city. Mr. Suga runs a somewhat questionable ghostwriting firm covering stories ranging from psychics to astrology. Hokada starts working as a grossly underpaid “intern” for Mr. Suga—and he ends up covering a story about so-called “sunshine girls.”

After a chance encounter at a McDonald’s where Hina takes pity on the starving Hokada, Hokada saves Hina from a rather unsavory hostess club owner. The two quickly become friends, and Hokada discovers that Hina is a real “sunshine girl.” The pair starts falling for each other as they take on the world together—two teenagers struggling to survive in an adult realm. 

Climate Change Over Love Stories

It’s easy to try drawing comparisons between Weathering With You and Your Name , considering that both films involve teenage lovers. Some other publications have gone as far as calling Weathering With You a “follow up” to Your Name .

Sure, both films share the same blend of traditional Shinto elements with sci-fi characteristics, and Shinkai’s characteristic dream-like animation style—but the two couldn’t be more different beyond that. While Your Name was a romance movie set in the backdrop of a natural disaster, the romance in Weathering With You is actually an allegory for how humans perceive and grapple with climate change . 

A central plot element in Weathering With You is the rainstorm in Tokyo—and how weather affects, and can be affected by humans. In Weathering With You , rainstorms threatens to flood Tokyo, disrupting its infrastructure and endangering its residents, much like how climate change will threaten the very existence of Tokyo over the next few decades.

Various Tokyo residents seek Hina’s help to pray for sunshine at key events in their lives—be it farmers markets or weddings—because sunshine improves people’s moods. While this mood effect is rooted in scientific fact , the aversion that Tokyo residents have towards rain may well be a reference to the pain and suffering that come from climate change’s aggressive weather impacts.

Hina’s ability to affect the weather also parallels to how humanity has an opportunity to avert the worst-case outcomes of climate change . Throughout the film, Shinkai makes it obvious that Hina has the ability to prevent an ecological disaster for Tokyo by casting away the rain storm. 

Unfortunately, Hina struggles with her powers much in the same way that contemporary society struggles with addressing climate change.  While Hina has the ability to solve the environmental catastrophone facing Tokyo, she has to sacrifice significant parts of her relationship with Hokada in order to save the city—a sacrifice that Hokada is unwilling to allow Hina to undertake. Without giving too much away, the tension between doing what’s best for society, versus doing what’s best for the couple more selfishlessly, is a major point of tension throughout the plot of the film. Most movie-goers will see this tension as part of a broader romantic drama, but we see it as part of an allegory for how society must choose between short-term selfishness and long-term selflessness in order to address climate change. 

Dreams or Nightmares?

Allegories aside, Shinkai’s ability to create dream-like worlds is even more evident than before in Weathering With You . Mysterious fish-shaped beings appear throughout the movie, and there are spectacular scenes of Hokada and Hina flying through the sky while they fight dragons made of clouds.

Part of what anime allows versus CGI-heavy live action movies is an elevated suspension of disbelief—the fact that anime is not expected to be based on “real life” lets storytellers explore worlds a bit more removed from reality. Throughout Weathering With You , I never questioned whether any character or scene was realistic, whether it was an anthropomorphic kitten that Hokada picked up, or more surreal scenes where storms become Shinto spirits rather than natural weather systems. 

Shinkai previously inspired viewers using worlds filled with bright colors and loosely optimistic scenes—however, in Weathering With You , we see dreams filled with grey from rain and clouds. While in Your Name the scenes of metropolitan Tokyo were vibrant and full of light, Weathering With You features the grimier and seedier underbelly of the city. 

On the surface, Weathering With You is a touching love story, and certainly many people who watch the film will find themselves emotionally moved. However, to simply regard this as a Shinkai romance anime cheapens the significance of the film. Weathering With You is a dire warning to humanity on the future of our world if we don’t take drastic actions to reduce our impact on the environment. Enjoy the love story while you watch, but take some time afterwards to think about how inaction on climate change might doom us all.

“Weathering With You” is in theatres across Japan and Hong Kong, and will be released across Asia later this year. The movie is coming to the US and Canada in early 2020. 

Weathering With You (Japanese: 天気の子) — Japan. Dialog in Japanese.  Directed by Makato Shinkai. First released July 19, 2019. Running time 1hr 54min. Voices by Kotaro Daigo, Nana Mori. 

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Review: your name (japan, 2016), by jake goldwasser, review: “after the rain” straddles the line between friendship and romance, by akshay suggula, review: the girl who leapt through time (japan, 2006), by anthony kao, the 11 best japanese movies of 2018, review: the place promised in our early days (japan, 2004), the 16 best japanese romance movies, review: whisper of the heart (japan, 1995).

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• Weathering With You

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Weathering With You Movie Review : This film with its intriguing plot and Makoto Shinkai's skillful direction is a compelling watch

• Times Of India

Weathering With You - Official Trailer

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Karan kumar 1689 days ago

Masterpiece movie

aniket arun ghayal 1690 days ago

Another masterpiece by MAKOTO SHINKAI.<br/>Movie have amazing animation. Music by Randwimps give you goosebumps.<br/>Story is amazing.<br/>Bollywood and Indian animation shall learn from them and make good and decent movies not movies that are made nowdays by them.<br/>Everyone shall go and watch this amazing movie. You will fall in love with it.

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‘Weathering With You’ Review: A Beautiful but Flawed Film about Romance and Climate Change

The director of ‘Your Name.’ returns with a misguided love story.

Editor's Note: This is a repost of Rafael Motamayor 's 2019 TIFF review of the film, which is now available on Blu-ray & DVD  from GKIDS and Shout! Factory, and will be released in a Collector's Edition this November.

Though he’s been making acclaimed movies for years, it was not until Your Name. became the highest-grossing anime film ever in Japan and a global sensation that people started eagerly anticipating Makoto Shinkai ’s next feature, Weathering With You . The result is a beautifully animated film about love, growing up, and human’s emotional connection to the weather, but also a film that uses climate change as a mere plot device while ignoring the very real threat of the climate crisis that feels somewhat wrong to do in 2019 - especially when the teen target audience takes the subject way more seriously than the film does.

The human heart is connected to the clouds, and the weather has an incredible power over us, the movie says. The sun and clouds affect our mood, so when Tokyo is getting non-stop rain for days on end, what we meet is the worst the city has to offer. This is not the shiny and fashionably Tokyo with delicious food and beautiful sights of Your Name . Instead we see a dark, damp, rundown Tokyo full of desperate people and those who will definitely take advantage of them, including a scene of a truck recruiting young women for the sex industry – a rare sight in anime aimed at teenagers. It’s a hard place to be if you’re unemployed, or a kid, so it’s especially hard on 16-year-old Hodaka ( Daigo Kotaro ), who ran away from home looking to make it in the big city and ends up living on the streets. It’s a fascinating look at the hardships of current-day Tokyo and the struggles of the youth today. We see Hodaka spend his days interviewing for jobs with yakuza-types that scold him for being too young, and running away from the only places that would employ him – the sex industry.

He eventually lands a job doing research on tall tales for a National Enquirer-like magazine for Mr. Suga ( Oguri Shun ), a shady yet charismatic man who treats him like a slave but at least gives him food and a place to stay. His first assignment is investigating the rumors of a “shunshine girl” who can stop the rain by praying. Weather impacts not only the emotional state of the characters, but the tone of the film. For the first act, as the torrential rains hit Tokyo and Hodaka looks for a job, the movie’s pace drags, making us feel the slow passage of time and the fear and desolation that is in Hodaka’s heart. But then he meets Hina ( Mori Nana ), a Tokyo girl who sees a pillar of sunlight one day at the hospital where her dying mother spends her last days, and by talking through a traditional Torii gate and praying for her future, suddenly finds that she can pray the rain away.

As soon as Hodaka and Hina meet, the film changes tone, the pace picks up, the color palette becomes brighter and even the music becomes more cheerful. The two realize that everyone wants a bit of sunshine, and since these are desperate times and people are willing to spend money on things, the two decide to start charging money for sunshine. Everyone seems incredibly happy about this, but the power of controlling the weather takes a huge toll, and Hodaka and Hina will have to make tough decisions on whether to put their personal wishes before the wellbeing of everyone else.

Fans of Your Name. shouldn’t be surprised to know that Weathering With You is every bit as beautiful as Shinkai’s previous film. The characters are drawn to scale, making their lives feel small and powerless against the changing world around them. The photorealistic 3D backgrounds bring the vibrant Tokyo to life in a way that even live-action movies struggle to do, with the train stations, busy streets and dark alleyways given extraordinary detail that will surely lead to another wave of anime tourism for those wanting to explore the many real places featured in the movie. Given the importance of the sun in the movie, it is a bold move to hide the sun for much of the film, but that is very much intentional. When Hina starts experimenting with her powers, Shinkai portrays every single ray of sunshine as if it we were looking directly into heaven, with phenomenal lighting that reflects on all kinds of surfaces to bring about splashes of light and color that instantly moves the film into a more cheerful and hopeful territory. This is aided by a fantastic and emotionally charged score by returning rock band Radwimps, which combines a classic symphonic score with pop tunes that will make you shed an ocean of tears.

It is easy to compare Weathering With You with Your Name. Both rely heavily on the romantic story starring teenagers and mix modern genre tropes with traditional Shinto beliefs and folklore. Shinkai uses this contrast to create a style of magical realism that feels grounded, even when Hina’s powers start entering fantasy territory. That makes the film’s exploration of climate change feel weird and out of place, given that Shinkai doesn’t seem to use his platform to say anything about the climate crisis. Characters tell of the time that Tokyo was a bay, and that it is futile to try and stop that from happening again. Though the film may be read as a criticism of traditional Japanese views on cycles of change, taken at face value the film seems to say we should all simply enjoy the few precious moments we have on this Earth instead of fighting its wishes. Weathering With You make us question whether we are willing to put others before ourselves and do something selfless for the long-term benefits instead of going for short-term satisfaction, and though it is seen through the eyes of a naïve, egocentric teenager, the film seems to condone doing the later – no regard for the very serious and real consequences.

Weathering With You is a beautiful film with breathtaking animation, a story and soundtrack that will make you cry oceans, and a cast of wonderful and charming characters. Unfortunately, it wraps the story in a conflicting view of climate change that feels like an unnecessary red herring for a film that seems to want to talk to current generations about something important but never starts a conversation.

Weathering With You does not currently have a U.S. release date.

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‘The Fall Guy’: The Best Movie of the Spring Flopped and It’s Your Fault

SO MAD AT YOU

We can’t have nice things. Ryan Gosling’s “The Fall Guy” was a riotous rom-com. In just 17 days, it’s already on digital. Sure, you can watch it now. But there’s a future cost.

Kevin Fallon

Senior Editor, Obsessed

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Universal Pictures

Considering that one of my greatest joys in life is to smugly shame people, this should be a joyous moment. And yet… I feel so sad. Exasperated. You know that phrase, “I’m not mad, just disappointed?” The bozo who came up with that clearly had made lots of people angry and was trying to make himself feel better about it. No, I want all of you to feel bad because, frankly, you deserve it.

Earlier this week, the spectacular Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt action rom-com The Fall Guy was made available for rent and purchase on digital platforms. On the one hand, yay: People will have easier access to what, in my mind, is the best movie of the spring. (Sorry to Challengers ! No offense, I Saw the TV Glow !) On the other hand: The should-be blockbuster is available to rent so wildly soon after its release date because not enough people saw it in theaters—and that will have ramifications that reverberate throughout the industry and, more importantly, my life and its happiness.

Now that I’ve evolved into my final form as a finger-wagging dad-type, I might as well keep going with the tired phrases: Actions have consequences, people. This is why we can’t have nice things.

The Fall Guy hit theaters on May 3, less than three weeks ago, armed with reviews that movie studio execs would offer their firstborn for and following a buzz-making premiere at the SXSW festival in March. It boasted Gosling as the leading man, after a year in which he was arguably the biggest and most popular movie star in the world, thanks to his work as Ken in Barbie and an epic Oscars musical performance . Blunt was the leading lady, herself a pivotal part of the other half of the Barbenheimer phenomenon and also an Oscar nominee.

Theoretically, you pack all of those elements into a cash cannon and watch the dollar bills fly. Did the money dispenser get jammed or something?

The box office was abysmal, especially for a film that cost $140 million. Hopes that ecstatic word of mouth would lead to, at least, a robust longer run in theaters clearly were just that: hopes. A shocking 17 days after its release, it’s now available on digital. This was supposed to be the film that heralded the start of a huge summer movie season. Instead, at least commercially, it’s a whimpered warning of disaster ahead .

I have to admit that I don’t often understand why people do or don’t watch certain things. Some gems are ignored. Some turds are confusingly embraced. But everything about this film seemed as much of a sure-thing as there could be these days.

Gosling plays a stuntman named Colt whose career—and romantic fling with a camera operator named Jodie (Blunt)—ends abruptly when he breaks his back in a stunt gone wrong. Eighteen months later, the former lovers reunite on a film set where Jodie is getting her big break as a director. They work through their acrimonious baggage while also weathering a murder cover-up subplot that ensnares Colt and Jodie’s movie production, a meta plot twist that’s a riot to ride with.

Universal Pictures

The film is the answer to so many complaints.

“Every movie these days is based on a superhero or existing IP. I’m tired of it.” This one is not.

“They don’t make movies that are fun for everyone anymore.” This one is the epitome of a four-quadrant movie .

“I miss when movies had actual movie stars.” Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt would like to say hi.

“They don’t make great romantic comedies like they used to.” Well, they do. It was this. And you didn’t go see it.

The chemistry between Gosling and Blunt is an It Factor that rarely happens in a film of this scale. Speaking of scale, the onslaught of stunts—most of which were practical—are more impressive than what’s in most Marvel movies. In fact, The Fall Guy set a world record with one of its set pieces, for most times a car rolls over in a film.

There is also: a needle drop where Ryan Gosling listens to Taylor Swift ’s “All Too Well” while crying; a parakeet that dances along to DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win;” references to Notting Hill and Love, Actually ; a dog doing stunts; a split-screen sequence that’s as impressive as the stunts; a karaoke/car chase hybrid scene; and a shot of Ryan Gosling emerging from water in slow motion while wearing a white tank top and jeans with the Sydney Opera House behind him. (I gasped, “My God,” when I first saw it.)

There are myriad barriers that contribute to people not going to cinemas to see a film. Yet… sometimes they do. They did last year, in droves, for Barbie and Oppenheimer . They do it for superhero movies all the time. The Fall Guy was exciting because it was an original premise and it was good . It was supposed to be a hit. Then, more original, great movies would be put in development for us to eventually see, curing our comic-book franchise fatigue.

The quick move to digital is a sign of a lack of faith that The Fall Guy would be able to, even with great buzz, get butts in seats. It’s also a sign of how the industry will view the film—as a failure—and retreat from investing in more like it. That’s a shame!

I have no doubt that once people see the film, they’ll love it. Do I think they’ll shell out $19.99 to rent it, more than movie tickets cost in most markets? Not necessarily. But I will feel vindicated when I’m flying Delta cross-country and The Fall Guy is playing on every in-flight movie screen. Where were all of you when it mattered?

No one really knows what to make of the business anymore. The theatrical market is erratic. Studios’ whims are indiscernible. And, clearly, what excites potential moviegoers remains a great mystery.

So I try to stay rooted in what I do know, and keep delusional hope that it matters. The Fall Guy is a great movie, and the future I want is one where more movies are great again.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast  here .

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