Weathering With You

Weathering With You : Review

“Weathering With You,” an anime about love in a time of catastrophe, It’s also a movie about a magical girl who creates sunshine by praying. A record heavy rain that pounds Tokyo throughout is relentless: It floods streets and homes, wrapping the city in a heavy blanket of gray. There’s beauty here, Every so often, a ray of sunshine pierces the gloom, illuminating a small urban patch. The first time you see the sun streaming, it’s in the company of the teenage Hina, The Sunshine Girl.

The central story develops slowly. Hodaka Morishima, a teenage runaway who almost drowns soon after the movie starts, Once in Tokyo, he struggles to stay dry, find something to eat, a place to live, a way to live. Trying to live on his own in Tokyo, Hodaka finds he can’t get legal work without a student ID. As his savings dry up, he reluctantly renews ties with Mr. Suga, moves into his office, and becomes a worker for his tiny writing business, alongside Suga’s lively associate, Natsumi. Assigned to a project to write about urban legends, Natsumi and Hodaka run around Tokyo, chasing lurid supernatural tales that Hodaka contemptuously dismisses as “fantasy novel-like stuff.”

The story grows more intricate after Hodaka meets Hina, a sweet, friendly smiler with a younger brother and no adult support. Hina appears to be genuinely capable of breaking the clouds and ending the rain in a small area for a short period, he quickly suggests they go into business. Joined by Hina’s little brother, they set up a website and start selling Hina’s powers online, bringing quick bursts of sunshine to people trying to enjoy their outdoor fairs or weddings. But Her gift comes at a cost, however, and both teens realize that eventually, her ability to tame the weather will reach its limit, and she’ll levitate up into the clouds to be vaporized. by the movie’s own mythology, Sunshine Girls aren’t long for this earth.

Shinkai doesn’t provide enough background on either of the characters (why Hodaka leaves home) and yet, audiences will have no trouble accepting that they’re meant to be together, finding it easy to root for the couple through some of the story’s stranger turns. “Weathering With You” blends the emotional concerns of 21st-century teens with elaborate supernatural elements, making for a visually dazzling, narratively convoluted adventure that speaks to the younger generation, but not necessarily the world at large.

The setting feels almost excruciatingly real, like a vivid sort of reality-plus. Shinkai’s version of Tokyo is too beautiful to feel entirely ordinary, but it’s still so thoroughly realized that it’s solid and fixed, in a way the characters never are. And to some degree, the world knows they don’t fit in this setting, and responds to them as implacably as nature always does.

 Weathering With You is clearly anxieties about climate change, though Shinkai keeps the image metaphorical and spiritual rather than digging into the real-world causes. The environment is out of balance in Weathering With You, and while it threatens Tokyo with gray, miserable days and eventually with storms and flooding, it threatens Hodaka and Hina in a much more personal way. In a film so obsessed with the fine line between childhood and adulthood, and with the ways grown-ups oppress and control people on the wrong side of that line, the message about the next generation paying the price for this generation’s decisions about pollution is entirely clear. That makes Weathering’s surprising, daring ending even more symbolic.