'Weathering with You' Finds Its Home in my Heart
What I love about Makoto Shinkai’s movie is that he’s able to take these grounded personal stories and frame them around sci-fi events without losing what makes them feel real and relatable.
His most recent film, Weathering with You, tells the story of Hodaka, a young boy who arrives in Tokyo during an unnaturally rainy season, looking to find a place to call home. He manages to find a job as a junior reporter as he begins to investigate the city’s urban legends and meets a young girl named Hina who can clear the rain and clouds just by praying.
The film is set to release in January of 2020 in the United States, however, I managed to catch a pre-screening of it while I was attending Anime NYC, one of the largest anime conventions on the East Coast.
It goes without saying, but I was blown away by the film’s spectacular animation, tear-jerking soundtrack and compelling story. The film was written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, who began to receive notoriety in the West after his previous film released in 2016, Your Name, and almost beat out Spirited Away as the highest grossing anime film of all time.
The film received worldwide praise. A live action remake was even announced by producer J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Cloverfield) to be directed by Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer, The Amazing Spider Man). With that being said, Weathering With You manages to capture all the beauty and grandeur of Your Name while still having its own identity and story.
Can we find our home, be it a place to live or people to share it with, when it feels like the entire world is against us?: This is the central question Weathering with You asks viewers.
What makes this such a perfect theme for Weathering with You is how well Shinkai paints a person’s home through the smallest of details.
For example, when we are first introduced to Hina’s home we see how all objects make her apartment feel lived in and cozy. The bins of toys her little brother plays with, the sewing machine with a skirt half finished and the small stack of cookbooks resting on the shelf in the kitchen.
These simple details make Hina’s apartment believable as a place where a pair of siblings would actually live, and it manages to make the scene stand out so much more in your mind. Especially when it feels so cozy as the rain pitter-patters outside everyday.
I also want to give credit to the movie’s soundtrack. Composed and performed by the band Radwimps, each song might not be a high energy burst like when they composed for Shinkai’s previous film, Your Name, but instead this soundtrack is a bit more somber, carrying the raw emotion and feeling of each moment of the film. Some of the tracks feel personal and bittersweet to the characters such as We’ll be Alright, but others like Is There Still Anything Love Can Do? feel like a chant for the city of Tokyo as the citizens find a way to keep moving forward through the rain.
There’s a melancholy and bittersweetness to Weathering with You that isn’t present in Your Name, and I think it’s what makes me prefer it over the other. It truly feels like the world is against Hodaka and Hina at every turn, not just with the people but nature itself trying to keep these teens apart.
It feels unfair, and in many ways it is, and I think we’ve all felt that way before. We want to stay in this cozy place we call home surrounded by the people who care about us, but sometimes circumstances outside of our control prevent us from doing that.
Yet, we still keep going, even though the mountain of problems that prevents us makes it feel impossible to climb — because we all deserve to find that home and the people that would weather it with us.