Probably the most crucial moment in Weathering with You, the latest animated feature from Japanese auteur Makoto Shinkai, comes relatively late, during a conversation between two secondary characters. One, a gruff police detective perhaps in his 50s, admits his secret envy of Hodaka, the movie’s 16-year-old protagonist. The boy may be a runaway from home and the law, but the detective admires his passion. The other character, a somewhat younger but still cynical and world-weary man, makes no verbal reply but sheds tears in apparent agreement.
The exchange perfectly expresses the movie’s essential spirit. A massive box office hit in Japan (the follow-up to Shinkai’s similarly successful Your Name), Weathering with You is a celebration of adolescence, with all its accompanying emotional intensity and naivete. The magical-realist story follows Hodaka through various adventures in Tokyo, some of them quite fantastical, but it also captures many recognizable situations and moods from teen-age life.
Hodaka (and the viewer) experience the drudgery and absurdities of a low-paying first job; the excitement of sitting in a friend’s living room as you work together on a crazy new project; the thrill of actually making money; the mixture of fascination, cluelessness, and embarrassment in potentially romantic or sexually tinged situations; and the fun of staying up late in a hotel room, eating and singing with friends. Above all, the movie captures the joy and pain of first love and first love’s absolute certainty that “we’ll always be together.”
The accoutrements of young life in the 21st century are on display here, as well: cell phones and social media, fast food and “gig economy” work. The heartfelt rock music that fills the movie completes the picture. Those two adult characters are not the only ones who admire young Hodaka’s sensibility —Shinkai and his team of filmmakers seem to, as well.
This embrace of the teenage mindset makes Weathering with You relatable, winsome, and poignant. It also ultimately makes the movie too emotionally shallow, however. This is a problem that becomes glaring—indeed, disturbing—at the climax and is the movie’s greatest flaw.
The movie begins with Hodaka looking for work in the big city, which is enduring a mysterious period of non-stop torrential rain. He ends up at the bottom of the employment barrel serving as a gopher for Keisuke Suga, a slovenly ne’er do well who works out of his run-down apartment. Suga and his assistant, the flippant Natsumi, cobble together pseudo-stories about paranormal events for tabloids. Among the urban legends they share with Hodaka is the idea of a “sunshine girl,” a young woman who supposedly can make the sun appear wherever she is.
Legend becomes reality when Hodaka crosses paths with the sweet Hina, an orphaned teenager trying to support herself and her younger brother, Nagisa. She shows him kindness, he tries to return the favor, and soon Hina reveals her special ability: through prayer, she can indeed make the sun appear, although only in her immediate area and for brief periods. In a Tokyo awash in rain, this proves a marketable skill, so she and Hodaka soon start their own online business. They provide relief from the rain for weddings, sporting events, and other special occasions.
As Hina and Hodaka work together, romance predictably begins to bloom. Just as inevitably, though, an array of complications also arise. These relate variously to Hodaka’s runaway status, Hina and Nagisa’s irregular living arrangement, Suga’s tragic backstory, a black market firearm that turns up at key moments (in an almost perfect application of Chekhov’s Principle of the Gun) and above all, the consequences of Hina’s preternatural abilities. All these complications come to a head in a crisis for our central characters.
For an animated movie about a teenager with supernatural powers, much of Weathering with You seems closer to a straightforward drama than a fantasy. While Hodaka is in awe of Hina’s power, this is treated more as an aspect of his romantic interest than anything else. Most of the other characters just take it in stride and accept Hina as a kind of unorthodox event planner.
As I mentioned, a lot of the movie is taken up with recognizable day-to-day activities and emotions. Some parts of it are funny. At several points, Shinkai uses rapid-fire montages to make a point humorously, as when Hodaka is rejected by an array of prospective employers or when we get a sense of his routine working for Suga—the latter montage is punctuated by Suga’s repeated, impatient question: “Is this all you’ve written?” Another running joke is that Nagisa, who is perhaps 10 years old, is a ladies’ man at his school, with a constant stream of girlfriends and admirers. He even offers romantic counsel to the older but romantically hapless Hodaka.
This often mundane, sometimes light-hearted, atmosphere does not mean the movie is lacking in amazing sights, however. The filmmakers draw on both traditional hand-drawn and computer animation to create an array of beautiful and haunting visuals. Some memorable images include a fireworks display above the Tokyo skyline; an unexpected appearance of snowfall and a still-more-unexpected instance of lightning; Hina silhouetted against the gold-red light of the emerging sun; a giant, island-like cumulus cloud that repeatedly fills the horizon; and the way Hina’s mystical ability causes raindrops to stop their fall and levitate back up into the sky.
The rock soundtrack, by the group Radwimps, is a crucial part of Weathering with You—Shinkai developed the movie partly in tandem with the musicians. Their alternately exuberant or soulful songs create the perfect Romantic Teenager mood. Those still in touch with their inner Romantic Teenager will probably find themselves listening and re-listening to the songs afterward (consider the vid below for a sample).
Two spiritually inflected moments are among the movie’s most memorable and affecting. One involves a client of Hina and Hodaka’s, an elderly widow named Mrs. Tachibana. She wants a clear sky so she can burn a small bonfire outside her home, presumably as part of Obon celebrations. The bonfire’s smoke, Mrs. Tachibana explains, guides home the spirits of relatives, including her husband. This explanation leads her to reflect on the connection between Heaven and Earth. The other moment comes when an increasingly desperate Hodaka utters a brief agnostic prayer, promising never to want anything more in his life if only he can hold on to what is already good in it.
For all its humor, beauty, and sentiment, however, Weathering with You has serious weaknesses. Here I must address the problems, both minor and major, that arise from the protagonist’s and movie’s teenage sensibility.
The minor problem is that the young central characters, while appealing, are not especially complex or interesting. They have a few basic characteristics—Hodaka is naïve but sincere; Hina is sweet and kind—and that’s about it. By contrast, the older characters such as Suga and Natsumi have more complicated motivations and display a wider variety of emotional shades. They are just secondary characters in this story, though.
The major problem is that Hodaka’s love for Hina, while presumably intended as ardent devotion, ultimately comes across as a dangerous obsession. In fact, many aspects of Hodaka’s behavior, when viewed objectively, go beyond the merely callow into the erratic and self-destructive.
Why did Hodaka run away from home, for example? He does not seem to have been abused or neglected; the only explanation he gives is that home life was “stifling.” Stifling or not, does he feel any concern for his parents, who must be going through emotional agony over their son’s disappearance? If so, he shows no indication of it in the movie. The scenes involving the black-market weapon introduce another unpleasant dimension of his character. Perhaps I am bringing an overly American perspective to this Japanese product, but the sight of a 16-year-old waving a gun at people is a little too jarring just to accept in passing as a plot point.
The biggest problem with Hodaka’s character, and Weathering with You as a whole, however, comes at the climax. To explain how this is so, however, I must describe the movie’s ending, so stop here if you do not wish to know any more.
Late in the movie, Hina reveals that her ability to bring out the sun carries a terrible price. Using her power is gradually draining away her life, and she will eventually vanish from this world. Her passing will, however, finally stop the constant, increasingly severe rainfall on Tokyo. In effect, she will serve as a human sacrifice to end the extreme weather. Hina then meets her fate, vanishing from our world into a spirit world contained within the giant cloud over the city. The rains flooding Tokyo stop, and the sun returns.
Hodaka cannot accept this, however, and goes on a mad quest to bring her back. He eventually finds a way into the cloud’s spirit world and reaches Hina there. In probably the most eye-popping sequence in Weathering with You, the two of them half fly, half tumble through this stratospheric realm. As they do, Hodaka frantically pleads with Hina to return with him to the land of the living, regardless of the consequences.
If Weathering with You were a Disney picture—or almost any Hollywood product—how the supernatural trade-off between Hina’s life and the endless rain would be resolved would be easy to predict. Hina and Hodaka would return home to our world but the sun would stay shining there, the trade-off somehow having been overcome through the Power of Love or the like. A different, rarer kind of picture would have the two accept that Hina’s sacrifice is necessary for the greater good, in a tragic but mythically powerful ending. (Perhaps that is what would happen in a Studio Ghibli version of this story.)
Neither of these outcomes is what happens in Weathering with You, however. Hina listens to Hodaka’s pleas and returns to our world. The rain then immediately resumes—and continues for years, eventually submerging most of Tokyo beneath the sea. In other words, saving Hina dooms a city of more than 9 million people.
Presumably we are meant to think that people in the submerged areas of Tokyo were evacuated and did not simply drown, although the movie makes no effort to clarify that point. Even if we just take as given that no one died because of the massive urban flooding, though, this ending still means millions of people have lost their homes, livelihoods, and communities in what would be a massive human and economic catastrophe.
As endings go, this is a pretty shocking one, especially given current environmental concerns (I don’t imagine Al Gore or Greta Thunberg will be choosing Weathering with You as a personal favorite). Moreover, the ending hardly reflects well on our protagonist Hodaka.
This is not to say that no case could be made for saving Hina, despite the larger consequences. The movie could have taken the ethical stance that averting environmental disaster does not justify sacrificing even one human life. Or it could have taken the position that asking someone, especially someone who is little more than a child, to sacrifice her life is placing too great a demand on that person. None of these ideas or anything of comparable seriousness comes up, however.
For that matter, the movie doesn’t even dwell much on what Hina’s own views or desires on this question are. The emphasis is on Hodaka and what he wants, which is not to be parted from Hina. As he declares at the climax, “Who cares if we can’t see any sunshine? I want you more than any blue sky.” The fact that his choice means huge numbers of other people will also be denied sunshine, blue skies, and places to live does not seem to occur to him.
Even in the aftermath of the disaster, when the full consequences of his actions have become clear, Hodaka does not seem to have any regrets or to have gained much wisdom. His final sentiment seems essentially to be “We’re young! The world belongs to us!” Such self-absorption combined with an utter lack of self-awareness is “adolescent” in the worst sense.
At its best, Weathering with You is fun, visually stunning, and often moving. It inspires a nostalgic longing for the enthusiasm and romance of youth. At its worst, though, it inspires the far crankier desire that this kid would just grow the hell up.
The Cameraman 