Weathering With You makes about as much sense grammatically as its plot. The movie hinges on an actually cool metaphor for the tragic relationship between the youth and climate change, which works with the storyline but the follow through is stupid to harmful. The film is full of pseudo-intellectual nods to global warming and the “Anthropocene” era, but in order to exculpate the decision of the main character, it almost verges on climate denial, offering all sorts of cooky, New Age theories about coastal cities returning to the sea, being reclaimed by nature. It is devoid of commentary on the connection between consumer capitalism and climate change, despite its visual attention to verisimilitude. For all the accurately drawn Big Macs and ChocoPies, the movie has no fucks to give about its apparent central metaphor. It is heavy with metatheatric jokes about art and anime at the beginning (for instance, one of the characters describes the fate of “sunshine girls” to be that they are eventually “spirited away” get it hahaha ok), but as the movie proceeds its weighed down with the stupid choices and incuriosity of its protagonist.
It is Japan’s entry for Best Picture for 2019, by the same director (Makoto Shinkai) as last year’s disappointing Your Name, the (spoilers) overwrought gender-bending time travel film that hinges on the idea that two horny teenagers who are inhabiting each other’s bodies would never bother to check the calendar or look for their own address in the age of cell phones and the Internet. Your Name was able to make Wife weep at its climax, so she had marked down this film as a must-see several weeks ago. I had major misgivings because of the enthusiasm gap I experienced from last time. I find Shinkai’s films feel emotionally stunted. Everyone feels all of their emotions cranked up to 11. They lean heavily on a fantastical element that feels manufactured more for its visuals than anything that flows from necessity of plot and never let common sense get in the way of a cool scene.
My least favorite things about this movie is the loose ends that are so lazily not tied up: the way that the dead mother of Suga’s child, who died “in an accident” years earlier, is obviously another “sunshine girl” sacrifice that Suga could not help either, because why else would Suga be the one to save Hodaka on the ferry during the freak weather occurrence in the first scene? Wife says that the inability to square the circle on Suga’s backstory is in line with his central character trait, the way that he’s constantly undermining himself. Because why else would he stare at a wall of water gathering above his study and think, I should open the window to let all this water completely wreck my office. Or as friend put it, “If I let the water in through this window it will cause literally thousands of dollars of damage to clean up. Fuck it.”
Probably the most irritating thing about Weathering With You is how manufactured Hina’s crisis feels. There are no external forces of evil, a hallmark of some of the shittiest anime in my estimation. Rather, Shinkai has developed this quirky character, given her powers beyond her wildest imagination, then built in that character’s tragic end for the greatest emotional impact, and then tried to make everyone feel bad that her ability to change the weather should come with stakes and consequences. Consequences that Shinkai himself has mandated. No one but Shinkai has demanded that Hina should have to suffer for her relatively small-minded but mostly innocent acts of weather control. Hina at no point questions Why me? or How can I explain this phenomenon (without taking on faith the ravings of a old man whose own grandson doesn’t trust when interviewed)? Because that is not the point of Hina. Weathering With You advances the idea that you can only be female in a story if you are a busty sex object that good-naturedly laughs off the pervy advances of a 15 year old coworker or a flat-chested human sacrifice “not cut out” for underage sex work.
(Runner up for most irritating thing about the movie is the way that the lyric heavy music ruins the mood and unintentionally cuts the tension at key moments in the film, like when the police surround Hodaka and look ready to shoot him in the fucking face and a dumb as fuck love song comes on.)
Hina spends most of her time in various states of distress, whether its covered in a horde of water fish or inexplicably falling through the sky and breaking only her necklace or losing her ring that her friend of one month gives her on the advice of her purposefully androgynous little brother. Hina’s secret about her age is the dumbest possible plot twist for that character. Her blank expression of non-threatening helpfulness is played and replayed (every scene in which she and Hodaka interact is flashbacked) for maximal emotional impact at the climax. Natsumi, Suga’s suspected mistress, by contrast is pure fan service in low-cut tops, proffering alcohol to minors at key moments of celebration. She is available and boy crazy and not at all creeped out by Hodaka’s attention.
On the subject of our protagonist, the weakness of the climax comes from the lack of stakes in Hodaka’s “sacrifice”. He doesn’t lose anything in the process of rescuing Hina, except the millions of people and billions in property that come with rising ocean levels (which may or may not or “may not not” have anything to do with global warming?). In fact, his big hero moment to save Hina comes with a lot of suffering and collateral damage, which the movie is at pains to explain away in order to not cast Hodaka as a kind of monster for allowing. The displaced widow whom Hodaka and Hina help earlier in the movie while they’re still running their weather-for-hire scheme (charging people for a sunny day seems like the definition of swindling but ok) kindly informs Hodaka that the now completely underwater dystopia of Tokyo isn’t all that bad off because it used to mostly be a harbor two hundred years ago anyway.
Insofar as we’re led to believe that Hodaka’s thought about the damage he could be willing upon innocent others, he seems to accept moral culpability without ever thinking to atone for it. This scans pretty well onto his general MO, because his actions up until this have been fairly egocentric. The entire purpose of Suga’s emotional arc has been about the pain and guilt he feels because he can’t see his kid unless it’s sunny outside, coupled with the fact that Hodaka has a whole monologue about how people’s hearts are connected to the sky but fuck them I guess (Friend says). Friend adds, I thought (Hodaka) was running away from a bad situation at the beginning of the movie, thought I saw some scuffs on his face, said in my head “buddy, I get where you’re coming from,” but then at the end we see Hodaka just goes back home to his presumably concerned and loving parents to finish out his high school years. And that’s when Friend got it, Hodaka’s just chasing a sunbeam.
Hodaka gets a pass on other fronts as well, probably the most serious, least considered choice he makes is to pocket a loaded firearm and then carry it around for the rest of his life, to use whenever and on whomever he feels is most deserving. But don’t worry, this kid’s in love, so Suga won’t feel betrayed after giving him a place to stay and a job and weeks of guidance and support, even to the extent of appearing, inexplicably, at the place where the weather powers were first conferred on Hina without much explanation. Wife asks, was he the one who called the cops in the first place? How did they know where to go otherwise? There’s a moment when it really feels like Hodaka is gonna turn the gun on himself in a moment of emotional distress, while babbling about a magical girl who can control the weather, which should give you an idea of how poorly this film understands its own tone or cares about what it’s audience thinks its protagonist might reasonably do.
Because I can’t imagine this ever coming up again in any other context, Karen Yamamoto Hackler is a playwright on Oahu, HI who’s written about the tradition of rain dances in Japan that feel more culturally relevant than Shinkai’s artificial construct of the “sunshine girl”.
Weathering With You is a disappointment, which says something not just because it’s based on the director’s own novel and because it took him two years to make, but because I recently saw Cats and felt worse walking out of this.
