Weathering with You aka Being a fan of Makoto Shinkai

                I’ve been a fan of Makoto Shinkai’s early works like She and her Cat, Voices of a distant star and 5 Centimeters per Second (It’s still one of my favorite movies).  The thing about those works were that they were never full-length features.  They were short films with 5 Centimeters being the longest at 65 minutes.  But they were all tightly written stories.  His feature length films have always left me feeling disappointed.  His latest film Weathering with You was no exception.  

                The movie takes place in an alternate version of Tokyo, where the weather has become erratic with the norm being nonstop rain.  The movie follows a 16-year-old boy named Hodaka, who has run away from home and found himself in Tokyo.  He has no ID and little money, so he spends his time trying to find work and just survive.  He consistently goes to McDonalds and orders the cheapest thing on the menu but one night the employee, a young girl, gives him a hamburger because she thought he looked hungry.  Eventually he finds work at a tabloid writing about supernatural phenomenon.  This is where he learns about the “sunshine girl,” a person with magical powers that can bring sunshine.  One day he sees the girl from McDonald’s being harassed by some men and saves her.  He learns that her name is Hina and she is the mythical sunshine girl that the tabloid is writing about.  Hina has the ability to part the clouds and bring sunshine to a small spot in the city.  The two quickly set up a business where people are able to hire Hina in order to bring sunshine for specific events.  The business is successful and Hodaka slowly falls in love with Hina but then her powers start to take a toll on her body by making her slowly turn transparent.  Without spoiling the movie, the two have to deal with this revelation and the consequences of their actions.  

                Shinkai does a good job of world building but struggles with character.  His works are mainly about teenage love and exploring the nuances of this type of relationship when tested by circumstances such as time or distance.  This movie at is core is the very same concept but in a much larger wrapper and I think that larger wrapper is what kills Shinkai’s works for me.  In his shorter works, where he only focuses on two characters, the boy and girl, he is able to flesh them out and make them feel like real people so that the viewer can relate to them.  But with these larger works there are a lot more moving parts and I think Shinkai falls into using archetypes that he doesn’t even bother to develop past their core characteristics.  Even just developing these secondary characters it feels like he had to take attention away from the boy and the girl in this case; Hodoka and Hina feel underdeveloped.  Hina is just a manic pixie dream girl.  

                It makes me sad to see what Shinkai has become.  He used to be this unique DIY storyteller that created these beautiful and concise stories that felt true and real.  Now he just feels like part of some sort of movie making machine.  This was a cartoon and it had so much product placement.  I think the story of Weathering with You would have worked a lot better if he went back to his shorter film format.  There were parts of the film that I really liked and it looked beautiful but they were mixed in with a lot of unnecessary fat and just dragged the movie to the finish line.  

                I remember people used to tout Shinkai as the next Miyazaki but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Miyazaki movies weren’t just visually appealing but they had heart and whimsy, whereas Shinkai’s films have lost the heart and little whimsy he used to have.  His older works would pull at the heartstrings but with this one I felt nothing.  It was like watching marshmallow fluff.  

                I feel like I’m overtly harsh on the film because I am a big fan of his older work and these movies just don’t feel right.  I mean sure they’re serviceable and people might enjoy them but they don’t hold a candle to his older shorter stuff.  All of his full-length movies that have come out have been this way.  He has never gone back to the shorter format and I don’t think he ever will, which is a shame because I think that’s where the stories that he wants to tell really shine. 

4/10

TL:DR: It’s an okay movie but not worth going out of your way to see.  Go watch 5 Centimeter per Second instead!