“That kid is throwing his life away, just because he wants to find that girl... I kind of envy him.”
-Officer Yasui
Makoto Shinkai once again taps into a romantic melancholy unlike anything else in media. This time that romance clashes directly with both gritty realism and existential threats.
The film plays to Shinkai’s strengths — beautiful shots of rain and water, love struck characters fighting against all odds, and contemporary settings clashing with the supernatural — while still adding enough new direction to stand out as its own entry. It doesn’t quite feel like the massive breathtaking leap that Your Name was, but it’s still gorgeously animated and manages to provide a few exceptionally unique and powerful emotional moments. It is, to date, Shinkai’s second-best film, and probably the best anime film to come out since his first-best.
Its only sin is its structure — the first act in particular could be credibly accused of being a series of vignettes. As a whole, Weathering With You lags behind Your Name in that its central plot doesn’t thread seamlessly from start to finish. But even its seemingly random early events feed strongly into the story’s motifs and ultimately serve it well. Every sequence feeds into the internal struggle of Hodaka, our protagonist.
It’s when he meets Hina — the girl behind the film’s magic-promising title— that things truly get off the ground. And much credit is due for making this dynamic not at all feel like a clone of Taki/Mitsuha when it very easily could have. In some sense, it’s also stronger because of how the two undergo more change as we near the climax.
In the end, I found there were two primary aspects of Weathering With You that mesmerized me: its technical splendor, and the mental journey of its protagonist. It’s a story that argues, more beautifully than any in recent memory, for damning all else in the name of love.
