Weathering With You

“The human mind works in mysterious ways. You just need to see the sun shining in the morning to feel energized. A blue sky makes you feel happy you’re alive.”

Morishima Hodaka

In the past few years I have become rapidly enamoured with the sheer beauty of Makoto Shinkai’s animated films. His follow-up to the breakout success Your Name. is another supernatural romantic drama, this time following a runaway teen in Tokyo meeting a girl who can control the weather. As expected, the visuals are sublime, with incredibly detailed backgrounds and stunningly realised weather effects, from the perpetual heavy rain pervading most of the film to the moments of golden sunlight bursting through clouds. Weathering With You is undeniably more commercial fare than the meditative 5 Centimetres Per Second, yet Shinkai is still able to create characters that we want to see succeed, even through a heavily signposted and largely predictable plot.

7/10