Weathering With You Review (1/14/2020)

This past Saturday, I had the privilege to see Makoto Shinkai’s newest film, Weathering With You, in theaters. I’m a big fan of his previous work, Your Name, and I was excited to see what he would do less. To call Weathering With You a disappointment is doing it a disservice; it’s a perfectly satisfying and emotionally resonant film that hits all of the right notes. It’s just that it rings somewhat hollow when all is said and done.

The majority of Weathering With You is a delight, with gorgeous artwork and animations depicting breathtaking vistas of a grey, rain-soaked Tokyo and the beautiful beams of sun and blue sky that contrast it. This is perhaps the one way in which it tops Your Name; Weathering With You sets a new bar for beauty in anime film, and from the opening scene right until the end the beautiful artwork and expressive character designs draw you in and keep you engaged from the get go. The story takes its fascinating premise – following a boy as he falls in love with a girl who has the ability to change the weather – and goes some interesting places with it. Its mythology is intriguing, and the real world issues it tackles regarding the failures of Japan’s police force and foster institutions in regards to its children are interesting. Like Your Name, it uses all of this as a groundwork for a very personal story of romance and self-discovery that concludes in spectacularly emotional fashion.

It is, unfortunately, this conclusion that also lets the film down. While it may be crowd pleasing at first, any real thought put into it renders it completely insubstantial. There are heavy themes and moral quandaries that are never properly resolved in favor of a happy ending that is nearly identical in concept to that of Your Name. The mythology remains unfortunately untapped, and the love interest, a loveable and interesting character in her own right, is rendered a plot device and denied her own agency – a problem that is far from exclusive to this entry in the romance genre, perhaps, but a problem nonetheless. Ultimately, it doesn’t really feel like any substantial lesson was learned or character growth really earned, and much of what makes the story interesting is traded in at the end for a rather generic ending.

Weathering With You is certainly worth seeing if you’re a fan of Shinkai’s previous work, especially Your Name. For the majority of its runtime it’s a hypnotically beautiful and dizzingly romantic fable that’s sure to put a smile on your lips. Just don’t expect it to be anywhere near as satisfying in the end as Your Name.