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Weathering with You Movie Review

Weathering with You is a 2019 anime fantasy romance film directed by Makoto Shinkai. It’s standard fare for this particular director.

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“Dear God, if you exist,

please don’t take anything more

and don’t give anything more“

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It is set in Japan during a period of exceptionally rainy weather and tells the story of a high-school boy who runs away to Tokyo and befriends an orphan girl who has the ability to manipulate the weather. It’s another signature romance from Shinkai that is quite reminiscent in its high-concept idea to ‘Your Name’.

And I would say that the two are of similar quality. Again, this is a solid flick, but far from the director’s best works earlier in his career. What I found interesting here (and also definitely odd) is the movie’s mix of traditional fairy-tale like storytelling with more modern trappings. I obviously preferred the former over the latter.

I found the mythology excellent, the weather themes are very well explored and the film being concerned with climate is a rarity in an animated feature, and its originality in that area needs to be appreciated. But in terms of the romance, it’s more of the same. This is an effective central romance, but nothing that we haven’t seen before.

Hodaka and Hina are two wonderful characters, both so well developed. I found some of their shared scenes truly charming, though some are overly emotionally manipulative. The voice acting is excellent as well. However, the supporting characters could have been better.

The animation is stunning as would be expected from today’s anime. The climate elements were perfectly realized, the rain and everything else looked gorgeous and very polished while still retaining the element of fantasy. The movie is colorful and beautiful to look at throughout its runtime.

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Weathering with You is at its best in the first act when the initial mythology was founded. The world building and the fantastical elements are terrific, but the second half of the movie incorporated more real world elements and those scenes were much less interesting, though the ending itself was very nice. It’s at the end of the day another solid, but familiar flick from Makoto Shinkai who really needs to get back to the promise of his earlier features.

Weathering with You is at its most interesting in the fantastical elements with the real world ones being less engaging. The leads are great, the romance is sweet and the animation is gorgeous. But this is still more of the same from Makoto Shinkai, and I would like to see something different from him after the last couple of films that he’s done in the romance genre.