Weathering With You: The Sky Will Never Look The Same Again

You’re stressed and feeling powerless, I understand. I am too and I’m certainly not going to tell you to stop. Of course not. It is your natural reaction to the factors of your environment, general living situation, relationships with other, and the world as a whole. Fighting seems like an absurd choice, but community seems so difficult when the stress dictates how we must react. 

Accepting the chaos may be hard, but the more peaceful option, we can only do so much, but one thing we can do is to choose love, “Heading towards a place of no return, brightly and positively.”

Director/writer Makoto Shinkai found himself in an unenviable position. His previous work “Your Name” had catapulted his namesake from relatively niche auteur into international stardom. The pressure to make something he personally wanted to create versus something that has become “expected” of him must have weighed heavily on his mind throughout the conceptual and creative process. To brand Weathering With You in any way, shape, or form “derivative” I believe is wholly unfair. They share lineage, visual aesthetic, motifs, and even universe, but they are distinctly different films with different tones, conclusions, and ideas. CoMix Wave was once again able to delivery a uniquely beautiful, poignant piece that is able to communicate itself across as only they could through visually arresting sky shots, shots of rain, sunlight brightly cutting through the clouds, and starkly real dialogue.

Sixteen year old high school student Hodaka Morishima is a runaway. Frustrated and isolated from the modern life he hears so much about but isn’t able to experience himself, secluded to island living. He dreams of Tokyo life and all that it allegedly entails. Tokyo itself is engulfed in a quite literal washout of a summer. Historic amounts of rainfall are threatening to drown the city. As Hodaka is finding it difficult to survive as a small fish in the literal large pond, he is treated to an act of kindness by a young girl working at McDonalds, who notices his weary and downtrodden expressions and the fact that he has been idling there for hours. Soon after he finds a job and lodging at an occult magazine, he is able to befriend the girl, Hina Amano. Learning the similarities of her living situation as a teenager, alone, in a city that doesn’t notice he also discovers her ability to affect the weather.

The parallels to the realities of modern life, in particular the hectic, loud, and scary city life of Tokyo, are evident right away. Where income, cost of living, affordable housing isn’t guaranteed for the relatively rose-colored youth. A world that is, for the most part, indifferent to our presence. The compromise of ones ideals, necessary in order to climb the exhaustive and often unfair ladder of the business world. The younger generations gravitating towards the monetization of damn near anything and everything they possibly can in order to leapfrog the competition. Far from the idyllic countrysides and cityscapes of times past. It’s a remarkably convincing portrayal of a world gripped by seemingly ever-present stalemate.

The hardship is brilliantly balanced out with more moments of levity than in any other Shinkai film to date. It uses many of its elements smartly as pieces of the background. Allowing the work as a whole to be indirect instead of heavy-handed. Keeping one foot firmly planted in the reality of the dire situations they live in while the other foot resides in a self-deprecating comedic space. It feels familiar. I’d be surprised if it didn’t. Often the most popular posts on our real-world social media involves the heaviest of topics conveyed through the lightest and most humorous of tones. Their existence is being engulfed against their will. But they don’t mind, as long as they can continue living in harmony with each other.

It’s fairly unfortunate that main character consistency is broken in order to facilitate certain plot points. Being grounded in such reality, so much so that I feel like I could meet these people myself and breaking that illusion when the story demands it feels like one of the most genuine missteps in terms of narrative in the entire film. Sacrifice and compromise is one of the pillars of artistic creation but the believability of character is something that I personally believe should never be negotiable. You could hypothetically create the most unbelievable and absurd world you could possibly imagine, humans should always act as humans, through and through reacting to each situation as believably as possible, no matter the tone taken.

Connection is a motif that Shinkai frequently explores in his works. The speed at which connection can be created and maintained, connection to the dead, and unorthodox connection just to name a few. Here I believe the connection is more than the simple connection of romance fostering under the dirge of the beginning of global catastrophe. It is the connection of the stress of the modern world we have created, the one we have chosen for ourselves, and the natural world around us. 

There is so much in our world that we can’t and may never to be able to fully understand. Something is going wrong out there, up there, everywhere. We have put so much stress on this world in many different forms. Many of them tangible, yes, but the trickle down effect of the stress on the world is dividing us and creation an exclusionary, and mean spirited world. It’s not impossible to believe that it is the intangibles are causing the world to be thrown into chaos just as much as what we can physically see with our own eyes. Calming the storm off in the distance is just as much our responsibility as it is those who have helped to create this imbalanced world in the first place. Using our connections to foster love with as many means as we have in our modern place, to choose the world at any cost. And who is to say if we choose love, that we’re not also choosing the world too.