The director of Your Name returns with another tale of coming of age romance complicated even further by elements of the fantastical.
With 2016’s Your Name, Japanese director Makoto Shinkai made an animated movie for the ages. Exploring love, connection, and destiny through the prism of a body swap comedy, Your Name more than demonstrated the skills of Shinkai to bring to life a movie that tells a larger than life story that wonderfully combines gorgeous visuals and a real sense of emotions running high.
His new film follows young teenage runway Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo), who has left his parents in the country to make a life for himself in Tokyo, with the city experiencing an unusually rainy summer. Investigating urban legends around the weather, Hodaka meets Hina (Nan Mori) who has the ability to change the weather. together, they start to bring sunshine to people across the city and begin to fall for each other. But Hina’s abilities come with a price.
Straight off the bat, Weathering with You doesn’t quite cast as magic a spell as Your Name, if only because the concept that drives it doesn’t pack as big an emotional wallop. But that would be asking a great deal of it. As it is, this is still a gorgeous story told with as much visual flair as you’d expect from Shinkai. It is a story more driven by teenage melodrama, leading to moments of high drama amidst the teenage romance. Tonally, it’s all over the place, as it shifts from runaway drama to a young love romance, to a chase caper, all the while bringing in traditional elements of Japanese folklore into a modern setting.
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. Much of the magic that comes from this film is the startling free-roaming animation on display that brings to life a story that’s both steeped in tradition and feels thoroughly modern with its story of young love and city life. This Tokyo is vibrant, buzzing with energy and is consistently gorgeous to look at, with a smart combination of 2D and 3D animation allowing for this tactile recreation of the city to provide great grounding for the fantastical elements that have the city gripped in a constant downpour.
With a story that at its core is about young love, there’s plenty on offer elsewhere here that makes the film thematically rich, wrapping everything from independent business in Japan, to dubious police action, struggles for young people in the city and the environment within its narrative. The environmental concerns often feel a little clouded as to what exactly the film is trying to say, particularly as it goes into its unwieldy final act, but thankfully, all the characters at the centre of the story are so charming that you will them on all the way. They wear their hearts, insecurities and eccentricities on their sleeves, so much so that you can easily get wrapped up in the crazy going on’s
Weathering with You is a thoroughly endearing follow up to Shinkai’s Your Name, demonstrating a similar care for character amidst an incredibly designed and vibrantly animated Tokyo. It may not carry with it the same kind of staggering narrative umph that his previous installment, but it is yet another offering from the animation master that proves how dynamic a talent he is, with animation that is simply enchanting.
Weathering with You is out in cinemas on January 17th.
