On Monday I took the opportunity to see Weathering with You, aka Tenki no Ko, which means “The Girl Who Makes the Sun Come Out.” It’s the newest film by Your Name’s director Makoto Shinkai, and it was amazing. Here’s my spoiler-free mini-review!
As expected of Shinkai, the film was breathtakingly beautiful, showing us visions of Tokyo and other parts of Japan that no other director could manage. It’s the story of a boy named Hodaka who escapes from his boring life on a small island and comes to Tokyo, which is being drenched with endless rain as strange atmospheric conditions continue above Japan. In Tokyo he meets a girl named Hina who has a unique power: she can make the rain stop and the sun come out at will. This is known as hare onna, which is a major theme of the story as it unfolds.
While I love all the films of Makoto Shinkai, I’ve learned to approach them with some caution since the stories he tells somehow all manage to affect us so deeply. The intense drama of body-swapping Your Name as the fate of everyone in Itomori hangs in the balance. The unparalleled visuals and feels of Garden of Words. The complex emotions we experience while watching The Place Promised in Our Early Days. The charm and drama of Shinkai’s first major film, Voices of a Distant Star, the story of a girl traveling through the galaxy fighting aliens and sending text messages to her boyfriend, which take longer and longer to arrive the farther out she goes. But most of all, his masterpiece 5cm Per Second, the story of a boy and a girl who are drawn to each other yet pulled apart as life intervenes, which deeply affected me for days after watching.
Shinkai is a fan of including easter eggs in his films, like the teacher from Garden of Words showing up in Your Name, and naturally, there is plenty for fans to obsess over in the new film. Japanese fans have been busy as bees, picking apart the hidden tidbits in the connected “Shinkai Cinematic Universe” and trying to make sense of it all.
At what point would you say anime “arrived” and became part of mainstream culture? Back when I was getting into anime in the early 80s it was all so new, as we gathered at a local university to watch third-generation videotapes with nary a subtitle insight once a month. The arrival of Macross/Robotech and later Akira (the first anime film to get a release in movie theaters) helped make anime more popular generally, as did series like Sailor Moon and Evangelion, but anime still felt like an underground subculture we were all plugging into. Watching Weathering With You on a brilliant IMAX screen made me feel that anime has finally “won” the culture wars once and for all.
Will you be going to see Weathering With You? Tell us on Twitter!
What do you love about Japan? One thing we love are amazing doujinshi, awesome books that allow us to explore the sexy relationships between our favorite anime characters. We’ve got a ton of new doujins to show you today, fresh from the most recent summer Comiket!
