Weathering with You
Year: 2019
Director: Shinkai Makoto
Rating: 8.0
It's Tokyo. And it is raining. But it is always
raining in Tokyo. Sometimes a whisper of a drizzle or a steady rain like
a drumbeat that plays at an all night party and then at times the torrential
rains come suddenly and drown the city in a minute of a moment. And even
more peculiar are the times the sky just buckets down on a few feet of land
with a huge blast of water leaving fish flopping in their surprise to be
earthbound. When momentary rays of sunshine cut through the clouds, people
hang on to it as you would a long lost lover that you know will disappear
on you again.
Hodaka, a 16 year old runaway from a small suffocating town, is on a boat
to Tokyo when one of these rain blasts catch him and almost drags him overboard
but he is caught at the last moment by Suga, who then bums a meal off of
him. Once in Tokyo Hodaka can find no work or place to stay and ends up sleeping
in doorways or napping in McDonalds - where a young girl working there takes
pity on him and gives him a burger. Later he sees her being accosted by a
Sex Recruiter to work in a bar - when she agrees Hodaka grabs her and runs
away. Meet cute with Hina. Two years older than he is and taking care of
her young brother since their mother died. Hodaka ends up finding Suga again
and stays with him and Natsumi who is always accusing Hodaka of starring
at her cleavage - what 16 year old boy wouldn't. A fortune teller tells him
that there are Rain Girls, Fox Girls and Sun Girls with powers. Turns out
Hina is a Sun Girl who can stop the rain in a small area for a short period
of time - she is connected to the sky. But with powers come sacrifice and
she is disappearing.
This animation from Shinkai Makoto is rather marvelous. A teen love story
in a world sinking in water where magic and the mystical converge. He directed
the earlier Your Name (2016) which I thought was dazzling. The animation
here matches it. Sometimes it feels as if the story itself is almost secondary
to the animation which is just so satisfying. Incredibly detailed at times
as he pictures Tokyo as a city of neon, ads, small shops, sex parlors, winding
alley ways, vending machines and droplets of reflecting rain. And then he
pulls back and amazing cityscapes emerge of a city going about its business
- trains running, people rushing to work, cars honking - all dwarfed by the
giant skyscrapers that surround them and keep the water in.
It is perhaps too long coming in near 2 hours, the ending felt like it needed
some work on it, I wish he didn't use the standard anime faces but gave them
more detail (weird when he gives a cigarette pack more detail than faces
- but that is the anime way), not sure if the many pop songs add to the mood
or detract from the narrative - but these are small criticisms for a wonderfully
ambitious film. I wish I understood the creative process behind something
like this because to me it looks so complicated.
After each Japanese animation I watch, I give the same old complaint like
a broken record - why can't American animation be more like this. The Japanese
combine a great emotional story with artistic ambitions while American animation
from Disney or Pixar is just consumable computer generated pap. Funny yes;
even emotional yes, but ultimately something to watch and forget. No one
raves about the actual animation. I think we are so dumbed down in our expectations
of our animation that we are satisfied with such pedestrian workmanship.
Just my opinion.
