Weath­er­ing with You – first look review

Rain has always been a promi­nent nat­ur­al force in the work of Japan­ese ani­mé direc­tor Mako­to Shinkai. It is emblem­at­ic of a sort of spir­i­tu­al con­nec­tion between the heav­ens and the emo­tions of the young adults at the cen­tre of his films. In Weath­er­ing With You, his lat­est film and fol­low up the acclaimed, box-office smash­ing fan­ta­sy romance Your Name, this con­nec­tion has been thrown out of bal­ance, with the appear­ance of rain shift­ing into some­thing more oppres­sive and ominous.

The film fol­lows 16-year-old Hodoka Mor­ishi­ma, a run­away fend­ing for him­self in the city. It is anoth­er fan­ta­sy romance from Shinkai, but this time set against the back­drop of cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change, in an alter­nate real­i­ty Tokyo where the rain hasn’t stopped for sev­er­al months. Upon arrival, Hodoka soon ends up liv­ing on the street until, tak­en in by Kei, the edi­tor of a con­spir­a­cy mag­a­zine, who saved Hodoka’s life on the boat en route to Tokyo. Offer­ing Hodoka mon­ey, food and shel­ter in exchange for work, the new job sets Hodoka on the path towards meet­ing Hina, a girl with the mys­te­ri­ous pow­er to con­trol the weath­er, dis­pelling the rain for clear sunshine.

While mileage may vary with Shinkai’s par­tic­u­lar flavour of melo­dra­ma, there’s no deny­ing its deliv­ered using tac­tile, detailed and beau­ti­ful­ly paint­ed ani­ma­tion. Grandiose tech­ni­cal flour­ish­es empha­sise the film’s emo­tion­al peaks with a per­fect mix­ture of CG and dig­i­tal ren­der­ing, boast­ing sweep­ing vis­tas in tan­dem with Hodoka’s bleed­ing-heart narration.

The film also bears all of the nar­ra­tive hall­marks of his pre­vi­ous work: the band Radwimp’s orig­i­nal score kicks in as the vir­tu­al cam­era dra­mat­i­cal­ly tilts to the sky; romances are threat­ened by ancient Japan­ese prophe­cies; and teenage horni­ness over­comes apoc­a­lyp­tic dis­as­ter. But where his last film wist­ful­ly looked back to the past, this one is fear­ful of the future, with the creep­ing ter­ror of cli­mate change and its dras­tic impli­ca­tions for our phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al well­be­ing sit­ting front and centre.

Despite the imme­di­ate­ly grand scope of the plot, Shinkai still val­ues the lit­tle dra­mas of being a teenag­er – whether that’s Hodoka’s paralysing fear and excite­ment over going to a girl’s house for the first time, or his bur­geon­ing feel­ings for a girl who he fears might be com­plete­ly beyond him. All of this emo­tion and toil even­tu­al­ly reach­es an excit­ing and also some­what dement­ed final act, as the con­se­quences of Hodoka’s peri­od of vagrancy, and Hina’s tam­per­ing with the nat­ur­al world, come to a head at the same time.

That said, it would be a mis­take to think that Weath­er­ing With You is strict­ly about cli­mate change – this is a fan­ta­sy romance first and fore­most, and search­ing for a defin­i­tive mes­sage on the envi­ron­ment is a fruit­less task. There’s no real solu­tion, but the clos­est thing to it is a moment where Hodoka and Hina find them­selves falling togeth­er, hand in hand. Per­haps the faith that every­thing will be ok in each other’s com­pa­ny is where Shinkai sees our salvation.