Mark Reviews Movies: WEATHERING WITH YOU

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 15, 2020

Watching Weathering with You, one is often taken aback by the level of detail in the animation. The story involves a fantastical element, namely that a teenage girl can affect the weather by praying or meditating, but writer/director Makoto Shinkai's tale is very much about the real world. It's a place where the weather and, seemingly, the climate are in a state of chaos. Tokyo has suffered from a non-stop downpour of rain for months. Floods are common. Storms of powerful bursts of water happen without warning. People are starting to think that the sun might never emerge from behind the clouds again.

There's little avoiding that Shinkai's movie almost bypasses the realm the allegory to become a direct commentary on climate change. The only thing that keeps it more of a general fable than any kind of real-world environmentalist parable is that girl, whose fate is directly tied to the weather in ways that turn from hopeful to potentially tragic as the story unfolds. There's also the issue of movie's third act and epilogue, which are about as far removed from an environmentalist message as one can get.

We'll get to that later. In the meantime, though, there is the physical world of the movie, which is completely animated by both traditional and computer-generated methods to create a marvel of a thing to see. From the start, when Hina (voice of Nana Mori) leaves the bedside of her dying mother in the hospital to follow a ray of sunlight beaming through the clouds, we're amazed at how Shinkai and his team of animators have faithfully recreated the city of Tokyo. The more amazing part, though, is how precisely they've re-created the ways in which rain and sunlight behave in the natural world.

The opening shot takes us across the city, as a storm rages, and through the hospital room window, where the drops of rain land and smear across the glass in a way that's instantly, familiarly authentic. A later shot simply watches as water pools on the ground, which becomes distorted by the light refracting through the wet.

As for the sun, when the light emerges through the clouds, its reflection off the windows and metal of the city's skyscrapers is blinding. The light pools, too, on a rooftop shrine that Hina discovers by the following the sunbeam. Standing there, we're almost subconsciously reminded that sunlight has different quality depending on the surfaces upon which it's reflecting. A "dry" sunlight is notably, if mostly imperceptibly different from a "wet" one, and the artists here are so skilled at a sense of verisimilitude in their animation that they don't just give us the fact of light and water. They give us the specific qualities of them, too.

The story is, unfortunately, not quite as detailed and thoughtful as the artistic means used to tell it. After that prologue, we meet Hodaka (voice Kotaro Daigo), a 16-year-old boy who has run away from a small village to come to Tokyo. Unable to find work to support his new life, he goes from living in a rented room to living on the street. He does find a job writing for tabloid editor Keisuke (voice of Shun Oguri), who saved Hodaka's life on the boat to the Tokyo.

Later, Hodaka meets Hina, who's being taken into a sex club, and scares away the club's violent owner with a pistol he had found days earlier. She shows him that she's able to make the sunshine appear by praying for it, and the two, with the help of Hina's younger brother Nagi (voice of Sakura Kiryu), start a business. People can request the sun for a special occasion, and Hina will make it appear for a fee.

There is more to the story than this (A few subplots, such as the police looking for Hodaka and the widower Keisuke trying to spend more time with his daughter, are here), but at least at first, the core of it is Hina's unique ability, as well as the suggestion that there might be darker consequences to something that seems so inherently hopeful. On an allegorical level, Shinaki appears to be tackling the idea that humanity can and does affect the environment in a direct way—that we possess the power both to harm the planet and to minimize or reverse that harm.

His story, though, trips on its own intentions by focusing on Hodaka, whose teenage obsession with potentially romantic milestones eventually drives this tale into pure melodrama. The movie's fable-like qualities become more about the boy trying to save Hina, the girl on whom he has an intense crush (and who has other things—such as her powers, the recent death of her mother, and the responsibility of raising her brother—on her mind), from her fate.

The movie's climactic sequence of plot, which goes from a standoff and a chase with the police to an otherworldly rescue mission (an admittedly beautiful one, which is to be expected), goes against much of what has been established here, save for that one-sided romance. The ultimate lesson of Weathering with You isn't hopeful. It's resigned, fatalistic, and rather selfish. Shinkai has grandly romantic ambitions with it, but the real takeaway is that the fate of the world shouldn't be trusted to the hormones of a teenage boy.

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