When one watches romantic movies
and TV shows regularly for a significant part of their lives, they will come to
perceive that perhaps every possible variation on a love story – the meeting,
the interactions, the character dynamics, the obstacles, and the resolution –
has pretty much been told to meta death. In that case writers tend to spice up
the romantic narrative by blending it with another genre; for instance,
romantic fantasy where the love story is enhanced, possibly even rooted in a
mysterious magical element or too. One of the best in the Japanese media
industry at doing that is none other than Makoto Shinkai.
Nowadays Makoto Shinkai might be
hailed by the anime industry and dedicated fandom as a “new-generation” Hayao
Miyazaki, making remarkable anime films, some of them teen/young-adult romances
particularly the 2016 (modest) international blockbuster “Your Name.” For my
part I got to know him as a college student in the 2000s when I saw his short movie
“Voices of a Distant Star.” Not being able to watch “Your Name” has been one of
my regrets where anime is concerned. But now I get to catch up with Makoto
Shinkai’s work by seeing “Weathering with You” and writing my impressions on
it.
Shinkai has a flair for spicing
up stories of love by adding a larger-than-life element to them. There is the alien
invasion angle to the story of two sweethearts from high school separated by
light-years of interstellar distance. There is the quirk of “body-switching”
between a Tokyo city boy and a country town girl living three years apart in “Your
Name.” “Weathering with You” dips into the well of very old Shinto traditions, proposing
the quirk of present-day Tokyo and Kanto region being soaked in a strange
period of non-stop rain, along with a girl who could somehow make the sun shine
in such weather.
So begins the converging story of
Hodaka Morishima, a first-year high schooler from a small island town who runs
away from home to go to ever-rainy Tokyo, and city resident Hina Amano. As a
minor and a runaway he cannot legally apply for a job to support himself, although
he manages to find work anyway thanks to Keisuke Suga (Shun Oguri), a minor
publisher of “urban legend” fluff pieces who saved Hodaka from being blown
overboard his Tokyo-bound ferry by a freak squall. But his most important
encounter in the big city is with Hina.
Hodaka and Hina first know of
each other when she, noticing him eating multiple nights at the McDonald’s
where she works as service crew, sneaks him a free Big Mac. He repays the favor
somewhat by helping her escape from a sleazy club owner’s proposition. Hina
then reveals her secret to Hodaka: by praying hard enough she can make the rains
stop and the sun shine in any localized area of Tokyo. Hodaka inspires her to go
into business, with his help, as a makeshift Shinto “weather maiden” providing
sunshine services for special events. While this enables Hina to make ends meet
for herself and her little brother, Keisuke’s article research on girls who can
control weather hints that such power comes at a price.
Once again, Makoto Shinkai
demonstrates his mastery at getting into the headspaces of young people falling
in love, as well as how they respond to and cope with the larger craziness
wherein their love chooses to develop in. Hodaka is a high school freshman with
no more experience in the bigger world, while Hina has been forced by
circumstances to mature and care for her only surviving family. He is naïve,
she is worldly; and yet they find common ground.
The other characters in their
life also serve to liven up the narrative with their own levels of wacky
craziness and parallel dramatic issues. What is perhaps most interesting is
Shinkai’s own admission in an interview leading up to the film’s Japan
premiere, explaining that Keisuke Suga, voiced by actor Shun Oguri, is his own
character study on his own life as he grows older (he was in his 30s when I saw
“Voices;” now he is 46) and raises his own child. Keisuke’s backstory as a
widower whose asthmatic young daughter is under his mother-in-law’s custody
makes a nice contrast to Hodaka and Hina’s own travails in the film.
Making up the ranks of the cast
is model-actress Tsubasa Honda as Natsumi, Keisuke’s publishing assistant who
takes Hodaka under her “cool big sis” wing. Hina’s brother Nagi (Sakura Kiryu)
is another source of comic relief thanks to his characterization as a kid
Casanova who not only scores plenty of girls but somehow manages to make them
get along together with him as focal point. And these moments of levity are
quite the counterbalance for the more emotional moments of “Weathering with
You,” particularly involving a pistol that Hodaka finds in the garbage, in a
magnificent example of Chekov’s gun.
All told, Makoto Shinkai
definitely crafts a beautiful package in “Weathering with You,” delivering yet
another coming-of-age romance set in the backdrop of fantastic superstition and
a splendid setting of Tokyo, drenched in rain as it is. Not for nothing perhaps
was it selected to be the Japanese entry for “Best International Feature Film”
at the 92nd Academy Awards, some 22 years after Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess
Mononoke” (1997, not nominated). The nomination of “Weathering” itself is still
up in the air, but such a distinction might somehow help to remove the film
from the looming box-office shadow of “Your Name.”
There have been some other
reviewers of this Makoto Shinkai movie that think his 2016 work should have
been given the Oscar shot. But when one simply takes the time to watch “Weathering
with You” and not think about all the Shinkai productions that came before,
they will feel that this new story of love in a magically crazy world stands
out on its own. Anime fans looking beyond the usual fare have got to give this
film a shot.
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