A runaway and a girl who can stop the rain
Weathering with You follows Hodaka, a sixteen-year-old who has run away from a troubled rural home to Tokyo, scraping together work and shelter during a summer of unusually persistent rain. He meets Hina, an orphan supporting her younger brother alone, who reveals she can part the clouds over a small area with a prayer, becoming, in the local folklore Shinkai draws on, a sunshine girl. Makoto Shinkai wrote and directed the film as the second entry in what critics have called his disaster trilogy following Your Name, and from its opening stretch the film is explicit that the rain itself, not simply the plot around it, is the subject under examination.
A business built on a power with a cost
Hodaka and Hina turn her ability into a small business, selling clear skies for weddings, festivals, and outdoor events across Tokyo, and this stretch of the film has an easy, likeable rhythm as the two build something resembling a found family with Hina’s younger brother. That rhythm curdles once it becomes clear that each use of Hina’s power is quietly consuming her, tying their modest income directly to her physical disappearance, and the film lets this cost accumulate gradually rather than announcing it early, so the audience discovers the stakes at roughly the same pace the characters do.
Rain drawn by hand inside a computer-animated film
Shinkai combined traditional hand-drawn animation with computer-generated elements specifically to render the film’s rain, a technical decision he has tied to his own observation of how increased summer rainfall has changed the texture of ordinary Japanese weather in recent years. The resulting downpours, torrents, drizzle, and the moment sunlight breaks through cloud, carry a specificity that goes beyond mood-setting; the weather in this film behaves like something the characters are contending with materially, not simply background atmosphere behind a romance, and the animation department’s development work on the rain reportedly ran for months before principal animation even began.
A choice the film refuses to soften
The film’s central choice, arriving in its final act, denies Hodaka and the audience a comfortable third option: saving Hina from the fate her power is drawing her toward means accepting that Tokyo will remain partially submerged by the rain going forward. Shinkai does not stage a last-minute reversal that restores the city while also saving her, and Hodaka’s decision to choose Hina anyway is presented without the reassurance that everything will be fine for everyone else, which is a genuinely uncomfortable note for a film aimed partly at a young audience to end on.
Anger as a stated design choice
Shinkai has said directly that after Your Name’s near-universal acclaim, he considered whether to make a film less likely to provoke anger and chose instead to make one that might upset people further, citing his growing concern about climate change’s visible effects on Japan as part of that decision. The ending’s refusal to restore normal weather, and its insistence that a teenager’s personal choice carries consequences for people who never consented to bear them, is where that stated intention is most legible on screen, and it marks a clear escalation from the more contained, personal stakes of the disaster in Your Name.
A sequel to a hit that does not simply repeat it
Several members of the cast and crew return from Your Name, including composer band Radwimps and character designer Masayoshi Tanaka, and a cameo from that film’s two leads invites direct comparison between the two projects, which Shinkai has said he included because he personally wanted to see those characters again before their story ended. Weathering with You holds up against that comparison by raising the stakes of its central romance rather than simply repeating the earlier film’s structure: where Your Name’s couple got a clean, near-magical resolution, this film asks its couple, and its audience, to accept a genuinely costly and only partially resolved outcome instead.
A hundred and twelve minutes that trusts a teenager’s choice over an adult’s caution
The film grossed close to two hundred million dollars worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing Japanese film of 2019, and was Japan’s official submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, though it was not nominated. At a hundred and twelve minutes, it earns its place in an evening less through the sunshine-for-hire premise, pleasant as that stretch is, than through its refusal to let an adult institution or a last-minute miracle quietly undo what a teenager’s choice actually cost, a note that lingers longer than a tidier ending would have.