Weathering With You (Original Title: Tenki no ko), Makoto Shinkai's 2019 follow-up to his preceding mega-hit Your Name (Original Title: Kimi no Na wa), is much more effective as spectacle and viewing experience than it ever is as a film. It should come as little surprise to those familiar with Shinkai's previous work that the production values are stellar, but fans of Your Name may find this new story to be an overall less affecting affair.
Your Name was, of course, such a sweeping, international phenomenon that Weathering With You begs comparison to its predecessor. The film itself does little to dissuade this. It is clearly set-up as a spiritual successor to Your Name (and, as eagle-eyed fans have noticed, as a pseudo-sequel as well), and similarities between the two frequent: they are both bildungsroman, coming-of-age stories, both depict characters moving from the country into Tokyo, both feature light fantasy elements, stunning animation and music by Radwimps. There is a tragic loss, that is promptly undone in time for a happy ending. Weathering With You goes through these motions by way of a romance between Hodoka, a runaway, and Hina, a young orphan girl with the fantastical power of atmokinesis, of weather manipulation. Hijinks ensue.
Shinkai's films are often praised as timeless, or ageless, or whatever superfluous adjective confers his work rewatchability, yet I think they are rather the opposite. Whilst there is a universal romance to them, both Your Name and Weathering With You are expressly concerned with contemporary youth anxiety. This film, in particular, addresses the relationship between Generation Z and the environment- more specifically, the lack of any such relationship. Reflecting Japanese youth apathy to ecological disaster, the anthropocene takes a backseat in the lives of our focal young protagonists. Instead, for much of the film, it is the police, perhaps repressive society at large, who are depicted as the antagonistic force and enemy of young people. The police are repeatedly shown as inadequate, foolish and incompetent; frequently harassing the undeserved, at one point prioritising the pursuit of runaway children over the prosecution of a paedophile; incapable of performing their jobs, as they are repeatedly outwitted and outran by children; and, as you would expect, are proven wholly ignorant of the grander, fantastical elements at play. It is in resistance to the police that the core family of runaways is both formed and lost, and it is the abdication of ecological responsibility that allows the family's return at the film's climax.
For the majority of the film, nature is quite playful: it affects mood, rain makes people miserable and the clearing of the sky alleviates it. Hina can bring temporary relief from the rain, at the cost of a later, heavier downpour, something which the entrepreneurial youths utilise to charm the Tokyo citizenry out of their cash. Only in the film's epilogue is nature's destructive potential played out. Offscreen, in a time-skip. Refusing to sacrifice Hina to restore typical weather behaviour, rain continues to fall until half of Tokyo is submerged entirely in water. Typing it out makes it sound like such an obviously disastrous outcome, but this is presented to us as a happy ending. With half the city drowned, the film's resolution is one of its biggest curiosities.
If we perhaps view the character of Hina as representative of the anthropocene, as it is her atmokinetic powers which incur the calamitous weather conditions and her sacrifice which abates them, her decision to prioritise herself is pseudo-Randian; with the world pushing down on her shoulders, she shrugs. It's unexpectedly provocative material from Shinkai, considering the film is a mostly lightweight affair. One particular piece of dialogue resonates: "Who cares if we can't see any sunshine? I want you more than any blue sky." Hodoka confesses this to Hina at the film's climax, declaring defiantly that human will and human love should be prioritised over the relationship between people and nature.
Were the ending played differently, it would seem that the film is condemning a selfish, lackadaisical youth. But, in the film, there is no tragedy or horror to the ending. Life in Underwater Tokyo is presented as an undeniable improvement, as businesses expand, city infrastructure adapts and hopeful optimism abounds in the populace. For a film that starts off seemingly sympathetic to the vagabond, this ending shows little to no curiosity as to the wider effects of the lovers decision on the poorest of the city. Real world climate change, of course, will not affect us all in the same way: whilst the older, richer citizen is able to move out of her drowned house into high-rise apartments, many poorer people would be unable to do so. The mass displacement of people in the event of such a calamity would be a humanitarian crisis, not to mention the potential loss of life that may well have occurred in the transformation of Tokyo into Atlantis. The notion that the film's ecological disaster can be accepted as a return to the natural order actually serves as little comfort in this light. The anthropocene eventually rolling back is hardly something to look forward to, so long as the 'anthropo' still walks the Earth.
As such, it is a very strange film to view in 2020. It presents us a narrative wholly concerned with ecological calamity, but not with its prevention; the total antithesis of the messages of Extinction Rebellion, the Climate Strike and likely many of this year's Oscar acceptance speeches. In an otherwise easily consumed, whimsical fantasy, the ending proves a bitter pill to swallow. It must be said that, for all my gripes, it has certainly been the point where I've been most forced to grapple with the film, and its wider meaning. I do wonder if my failure to enjoy the ending is rooted in the void between Japanese youth sentiments towards ecological disaster and my own, Westernised perspective. As defeatist as it is, the suggestion that we (and young people, specifically) are actually powerless in the face of climate disaster may be closer to the truth than we'd like to admit. And maybe, if that is the case, then narratives of hope in the aftermath of climate calamity are a necessary, if unfortunate, tonic, to the rhetoric that suggests that our failure to prevent climate change signals the end of our species and planet.
Nevertheless, where I found the story unwieldy and alienating compared to Your Name's triumphant melodrama, I felt the animation and music were clearly of the same, if not higher, calibre. When Shinkai said that he found himself disappointed with Your Name, feeling that the studio hadn't managed to push the potential of the animation far enough and deeming the film "incomplete", I was shocked. My puny, prosaic brain couldn't imagine something surpassing Your Name, at the time. Weathering With You must have been what he was envisioning. How many films can you think of where one of the most startling sequences features someone eating a Big Mac? Where you will gladly watch long sequences of just rain, because each and every drop is stunning? Everything from sequences of food preparation to the sequences of Hina's atmokinesis are rendered with a level of care and dedication that makes nearly every frame desktop wallpaper material. The score and J-Rock musical accompaniments from Radwimps are of similar quality. It imbues the film with kinetic energy when it needs to, whilst never missing an emotional beat. Whilst some of the deployment of the J-Rock songs may be questionable, particularly with regards to the aforementioned offbeat ending, the songs themselves are a lot of fun.
I'm interested in seeing this film again! It just also seems like a crime to see it on any smaller screen. I don't want to watch it on my laptop screen, which I've never been able to get fully clean for very long, nor do I want to watch it on my TV, with its cluster of dead pixels in the bottom right. I want to see every detail of the animation blown to gargantuan proportions. I may be satisfied if we could screen it on the White Cliffs of Dover, but nothing less than that. That the film has received such a limited UK release is a deep shame. Everyone deserves to be able to see films like this on the biggest screen possible.
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