Oh, your name. is great. I will tell you as much. It's a terrific film with the best characters Shinkai has ever written going through an incredibly well assembled plot with one of the greatest drops in cinematic history. However, when it's done, there's not much left to explore. Rewatching it or reading Shinkai's novel may uncover more details, but its main goal on multiple viewings is either trying to recreate the original emotion watching it or showing it to someone else. Nothing wrong with that; It's a great date movie or a good work to show someone who isn't that big into anime. Weathering With You simply has a better chance of not collecting dust on my shelf.
Probably the biggest drawback for Weathering With You is how long it takes to get on a narrative track. The movie starts with small vignettes of our leads Hodaka, a homeless runaway boy, and Hina, a girl who is trying to stay afloat and take care of her brother after the death of her mother. What they're doing and why they're doing it is not immediately clear as we mostly spend time with Hodaka trying to live in a Tokyo that has almost zero tolerance for the homeless, especially homeless teenagers who aren't in some sort of school. He can't get a job and can't even find shelter in a Summer that has been nothing but an endless downpour. This is either preceded or interrupted by other aspects of the story like dreams or Hina's backstory. Most of it is simply living in the experience, which is fine for people like me, but for a general audience watching a movie waiting for it to go somewhere? It can be a little trying on the patience.
There is, however, the greatest visual feature of any Shinkai film: The beautifully-created Tokyo drenched in rain. Shinkai made a short film called The Garden of Words in which anything that happens in the film is almost dwarfed by the vivid and lifelike recreation of the subject's park, complete with the most realistic rain animation can offer. There's even a hotel package that you can take, which kind of skirts the student-teacher relationship from the subject.
Shinkai takes that and makes it the ENTIRE CITY OF TOKYO.
Backed with the "I made the highest grossing anime in history until Demon Slayer came along" card, he creates his most complexly beautiful film, perhaps only matched by 5 Centimeter per Second's ability to visually capture mood. There is a near photo realism almost to a fault since they got the rights to use almost every brand in existence, which can lead to scenes in grocery stores and on the streets feeling like a dozen commercials stacked on top of each other I get enough of real life. Since it's animation, it makes the magic realism of the story pop more since all of the weather effects don't have to struggle to be seamless.
After a half-an-hour, we eventually ease into the story. Early in the movie, Hodaka runs into a shifty-looking, semi-drunk Keisuke Suga who saves his life and later realizes Hodaka's situation. Hodaka first balks at the offer for help, but left in a city with zero legal options for employment, he goes to Suga who offers him a job as a gopher for his freelance work writing frivolous tabloid articles about local legends and superstitions. Suga is thankfully much more of a paternal and caring person than he comes off since he's also trying to regain custody of his daughter, but he is still in enough of a fog that he leaves much of the work and guidance to his niece Natsumi.
My initial digital rental of the movie forced me to choose the sub or dub, and while I'm normally fine with the original language, the casting choice of Lee Pace as Keisuke and Alison Brie as Natsumi led me to check out the dub, which is quite good, mainly for those performances. Pace is an incredibly underrated actor whose big chances are unfortunately forgettable and overly morose characters like a bland elf in The Hobbit movies, but if you've watched him in The Fall or Pushing Daisies, he at least makes you perk up when he's on the casting of anything.
Unlike Disney's celebrity stunt casting in Ghibli films which missed as much as they hit, the casting here is terrific. Pace's voice acting is absolutely perfect, capturing Keisuke's world weariness, even though he's relatively young and still has much to do. Larson finds the individuality in a young professional who is constantly on the hunt for a better job, and has that spirit of the street smart Ghibli women. Of the Hollywood casting, only Emmy-winner Riz Ahmed is somewhat wasted as a police investigator trying to sort out the situation from the wrong angle, but more because his character is simply a cattle prod to cause conflict and force the movie forward.
The original performances are fine as well, though they certainly lack standouts. However, it is also a movie that doesn't have the showier aspects like the gender swapping from your name. to need anything to stand out. Pace simply makes a meal out of his character in ways most people can't. The only thing comparable is a Dean Stockwell's 5-minute supporting role from the obscure movie CQ where he takes a jetlagged, exhausted dad who has only layover to talk to his son, and creates something special. His entire appearance is on Youtube if you don't feel like seeking out a super obscure movie.
At first blush, Weathering with You seems like a copy of your name. with a couple in Tokyo going through a supernatural event that becomes their lives leading up to something more tragic. Really though, this feels more like Shinkai meeting his older movies and his blockbuster somewhere in the middle, for better or worse. As much as your name. was designed almost methodically to be a crowd pleaser to the point where Shinkai actually had a chart that described exactly how the audience will react, the movie had Shinkai's best written female character in Mitsuha. She's fully developed, has her own attitude, and acts on her own without being shrunk by the size of her situation. The weakest part of Weathering with You is Hina with Shinkai in retrograde back to his leading women and girls who are completely eclipsed by the situations they're in. Having watched the movie three times, I've found Hina is rarely anything but her circumstances. She is resourceful and at least is given a scene where she shows off her cooking skills with cheap ingredients, but that's me actively digging to find things. Her brother, a middle school playboy with Howl from Howl's Moving Castle hair, is given more definition. Not much, but his one character trait is used to give the finale an amusing extra layer, at least.
In fact, plenty of the movie acts on Shinkai's earlier writing that is far less defined than his massive hit. Major details often get left out and treated like Easter eggs, like why the tower in The Place Promised in Our Early Days exists, or how the ending of 5 Centimeters Per Second is a lot of implied details under a one-hit wonder song. Many scraps of information here are left to the audience's imagination or to vague implications. Hodaka has band-aids on his face at the start of the movie that aren't really talked about. How certain characters died aren't dwelled upon. This can be a blessing or a hindrance to his work, and it took me my most recent viewing to get what the blessing was here, and it was a specific event that illuminated it: The Tokyo Olympics.
If I may be a grouchy person who works in television and sometimes has to be on the job until 3 a.m. because of the goddamn Olympics: These two weeks of feels are delivered at a cost that mostly outweighs the benefits. Many are displaced because the overwrought stadiums and venues have to go SOMEWHERE, billions are spent with extremely limited benefits, and in the case of Tokyo 2021, literally thousands will die because this event "had" to happen. You can say it was personal responsibility or whatever damn excuse you'd like, but because we chose to have an event that brought people from around the world to a pandemic hotspot that has been completely out of control, an almost incalculable amount of people will suffer and die. I'm sure there are people who will do their best to calculate, and most others will just sniff at the number and move on.
Of course, this could be a reading I pulled right out of my butt. Even if this is a correct reading, it isn't wound too terribly well around the movie. Beyond that, the conclusion is still too forced into being action heavy, the RADWIMPS soundtrack isn't nearly as catchy and wonderful as their last one save for "We'll Be All Right," his attempts at making a "Shinkaiverse" don't really land, and when given the idea of an ecosystem of a spirit world in a giant cloud, Shinkai seems just as disinterested in creating that world as he was in making the underwhelming underworld of The Children Who Chase Lost Voices.
BUT, this was a new thing I discovered when I explored the film again. The adventure continues, which is not a thing I could say when I watched your name. for a second time. I look forward to being able to discover more as I watch it again, even if it's just an excuse to see those achingly beautiful landscapes again. I think that is what Shinkai aims for in most of his stories, even if it's "less successful," like it is here. We'll see what the next adventure of this film has in store.
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