weathering with you movie reviews

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

About Rotten Tomatoes®
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening This Week
Top Box Office
Coming Soon to Theaters
Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

Fandango at Home
Prime Video
Most Popular Streaming Movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

86% Smile 2 Link to Smile 2
99% Anora Link to Anora
79% We Live in Time Link to We Live in Time

New TV Tonight

86% What We Do in the Shadows: Season 6
80% Poppa's House: Season 1
-- Territory: Season 1
-- Before: Season 1
-- Hellbound: Season 2
-- The Equalizer: Season 5
-- Breath of Fire: Season 1
-- Beauty in Black: Season 1
-- Like a Dragon: Yakuza: Season 1

Weathering With You Reviews

This Japanese anime takes the every day concept and builds a relationship between two teenagers yet to fully understand this film you need a little knowledge of Japan and its culture.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 25, 2023

Shinkai's technical achievement is his precision in capturing small details of urban life, with visuals so sharp that you might mistake them for a photograph at first glance. Yet there's an intensity of color in his drawings that no camera could provide.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 14, 2022

Despite the catastrophic and even apocalyptic climate, Shinkai makes sure his world is shimmering in radiant colors, love and humanity shining through.

Full Review | Jun 4, 2021

Weathering With You may have too many elements in common with Your Name, but it's a gorgeous movie with magnificent visuals and music. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 16, 2020

Thematically, as much as it all may seem relatively light-hearted on the surface, Weathering With You delves into some darker and more mature themes. It's a difficult balance to maintain but for the most part, it succeeds.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 1, 2020

Just as mystical as Your Name. but not as affecting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 26, 2020

While Weathering With You may suffer from a bit of tonal whiplash across the runtime, it's an engrossing modern fable, thanks to the vibrant life that is given to this stormy, rainy, Tokyo.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2020

"Weathering With You" is another great anime by the latest master of the category, and a film that everyone will enjoy watching.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2020

...the need to belong and be loved are universal themes that Shinkai, an expert crafter of young, teenage love stories, explores very well in 'Weathering With You.'

Full Review | Jul 17, 2020

Although Weathering With You includes serious social issues about homelessness and the hazards of messing with the environment, ultimately this is a sweetly sentimental film where the biggest messages are about taking life-changing risks for true love.

Full Review | Jul 12, 2020

A film with a huge heart and a vivid imagination.

Full Review | Jul 6, 2020

[The] plotlines ... seem to be on different planes altogether ... the characterizations are lazy archetypes and many points of tension are artificial. I still enjoyed it[.]

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

Viewing this as a standalone film without all the comparisons, it's hard to deny the wonderfully charming chemistry between Hina and Hodaka.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 14, 2020

I love this movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.7/10 | Mar 13, 2020

It is hard for anyone in the Japanese animation industry to escape the legend of Miyazaki. But Shinkai is paving his own path and he expands on the success of Your Name with Weathering with You.

Full Review | Mar 2, 2020

Weathering With You also explores the myriad effects of climate change on our industrialized society, but I think its message is one of simultaneous resignedness and hope.

Full Review | Feb 21, 2020

Another essential slice of thumping, bittersweet genius from one of Japan's great modern anime auteurs.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 11, 2020

This is anime remixed with romance and rock opera ballads - much more of a confection than a social critique. Weathering With You is a typhoon-infused fantasy grounded in a tangible reality.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2020

This film's simply too soggy to live up to Shinkai's other films, box-office success be damned.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jan 30, 2020

Weathering With You does a poor job of balancing its supernatural weather story with its central romance.

Full Review | Jan 29, 2020

an image, when javascript is unavailable

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Weathering with You’ Review: Shinkai Makoto’s ‘Your Name’ Follow-Up Is a Gorgeous Love Story About Climate Change

David ehrlich.

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Share on LinkedIn
Show more sharing options
Submit to Reddit
Post to Tumblr
Print This Page
Share on WhatsApp

Shinkai Makoto, the fiercely idiosyncratic anime filmmaker whose long-simmering career exploded into legend when “ Your Name ” became an international phenomenon in 2016, has always been infatuated with the environment. The likes of “5 Centimeters per Second” and “Children Who Chase Lost Voices” may not express the same ecological concern that courses through Studio Ghibli’s work, but few movies of any kind have ever devoted more energy to — or divested more emotion from — the worlds around their characters. From unknown alien planets to rural Japanese footpaths, Shinkai’s backdrops are so lush, saturated, and ephemeral that the space between characters is best measured by heartache. And that heartache always rises, lifting our eyes towards the heavens like the light from a distant star. If Miyazaki is obsessed with airplanes, Shinkai is compelled by the sky.

Shinkai has never been known to shy away from his favorite subjects, and so it was always just a matter of time before he looked up from his desk and decided to make a film that’s literally just about the sky — a film that elevates the environment into a character of its own. Already a massive hit in its native Japan (as well as the country’s official submission for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars), “ Weathering with You ” is nothing if not that film; from the very first moment of this stunningly beautiful, emotionally diluted metropolitan epic, the clouds are more than just a force of nature. They’re a portal, they’re a punishment, they’re what brings people together and keeps them apart. Here, the clouds are more intimately connected to human life than even the most extreme environmentalists would argue.

Of course, Shinkai fans know better than to expect him to make a clear, didactic parable about climate change; his stories tend to begin in a literal mode before the strain of distance pulls them apart at the seams, and narrative logic is sublimated into the stuff of pure feeling. “Weathering with You” is no exception. This may be a thoroughly modern fable about volatile storms and a young girl who has the power to stop the rain, but — for better or worse — it’s too soaked in raw teenage emotions to puddle into a simple tale about how we need to treat the Earth like we have a crush on it.

For a movie about the sky, “Weathering with You” is ironically one of Shinkai’s most grounded films — immediately more warm and engaging than “Your Name,” if not at all capable of delivering the same emotional payoff. Another romantically wounded yarn that starts with magical-realism before bleeding into fantasy, the film opens with a brief introduction to a Tokyo girl named Amano Hina (Mori Nana), whose dying mother is about to pass on to the other side. But Hina, sobbing at her mom’s bedside, is distracted by a pillar of sunlight that pierces through the clouds and points towards a Shinto shrine atop a derelict building nearby. Racing over to the Torii gate and praying for her future, Hina finds herself spirited away into a skybound dimension where her tears swim around her body like fish.

Back on terra firma, a very naïve 16-year-old runaway named Morishima Hodaka (Daigo Kotaro) barely survives a tempestuous ferry road into Tokyo. Unpredictable weather leads to volatile water, and the kid is almost tossed overboard before a sad-eyed stranger named Suga Keisuke (Oguri Shun) saves him at the last second. Alone and scared in the big city — where it’s poured every day all summer long — Hodaka might forget the warmth of kindness if not for the nice McDonald’s employee (Hina!) who spots him a Big Mac.

The twerp eventually moves in with Keisuke, and agrees to work as an indentured gofer at the scummy “National Enquirer”-esque rag he runs out of his apartment. His first assignment: Investigate rumors about “sunshine girls” who can stop the rain. That brings our nervous young hero to Hina’s apartment, where she lives with her whip-smart kid brother Nagi (Kiryu Sakura). In typical Shinkai fashion, it isn’t long before the three of them start a small, sweet-natured business in which they go around Tokyo and bring a patch of clear sky to any paying customers who need it for their wedding, cos-play event, or what have you (“Cool, let’s go make money with the weather!”). But messing with the skies, it turns out, also comes with another kind of cost.

As per usual with a Shinkai film, the first thing you notice about “Weathering with You” is how beautiful it is. Tokyo may be the most frequently animated of cities, but it’s never been drawn to seem as vibrant and alive as it does here. The megalopolis is always in motion, as people continue to go about their business despite the apocalyptic deluge. The gray pall that hangs over Ginza can’t dampen the extraordinary detail that Shinkai’s team brings to the district’s fancy interiors. Rain streaks down on the commuters bustling into Shinjuku Station. The Yamanote Line cuts through Shibuya in such a vivid way that it will feel like a memory to anyone who’s seen that firsthand; it’s still packed during rush hour, as no one seems ready to throw in the towel. Somewhere, the umbrella industry must be booming.

Shinkai’s characters are drawn to scale — their lives feel small, and at the mercy of an indifferent world. Hina and Hodaka are essentially just well-rendered archetypes who are trying to get by and maybe hold on to a ray of sunshine. She’s sweet and mousy and totally egoless about her powers; he’s anxious and delicate enough to sweat up his own rainstorm. Neither of them ever threatens to become more dynamic than the circumstances that bring them together, and it grows even more frustrating than usual that Shinkai’s male, emo gaze tends to keep Hina at a remove (a problem the body-swap antics of “Your Name” enjoyably addressed). Anime is rife with enchanted girls in peril and boys who will risk their lives to protect them, and this is no exception; the more that “Weathering with You” leans on the relationship between its leads, the more tenuous their bond starts to feel.

The supporting cast is able to pick up some of the slack. Shinkai relies on little Nagi for comic relief and the schoolboy — a precocious ladies’ man who’s already forgotten more about women than Hodaka will ever learn — earns many of the movie’s biggest laugh (Nagi’s absurd role in a third act jailbreak is so inspired that it leaves you hoping Shinkai will lighten up with his next film). Keisuke might be the most nuanced character of all, even if the movie seems reluctant to explore his disaffected sadness.

As Hina becomes more indivisibly connected to the sky and the weather above Tokyo goes haywire, the chaos is most engaging for how it might fall on Keisuke and his asthmatic young daughter. But Shinkai doesn’t seem all that interested in the details of that interpersonal drama, backgrounding such things in favor of a wild, numbing, skybound finale that conflates suicide with climate change as it weighs immediate personal happiness versus long-term human survival.

For most filmmakers, that might not be much of a debate, but Shinkai isn’t afraid to reckon with the primacy of what people need in the here and now. “We only exist between Earth and the sky for a short while,” a wise old man insists. Tokyo used to be a bay, and if the water rises to reclaim it, well… maybe we’re a little too attached to the world that we know. If you only see “Weathering with You” through a certain lens, then it can seem a bit conflicted about our stewardship of the planet. Should we just do what makes us happy, and trust that future generations will roll with the punches? Surely that can’t be it.

It’s not so simple. If the unmoored third act is emotionally inert and hard to follow, Shinkai manages to eke a sliver of clarity out of the confusion. By the time the film is over, the climate change question almost feels like a red herring in a story that hinges on how people will possibly weather the storm that’s already here. Humans can’t afford to pretend that we don’t have some control over the environment, but we also can’t afford to act like the environment has complete control over us.

“Weathering with You” screened at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival . GKids will release it in theaters later this year.

Most Popular

‘Weathering With You’: Film Review

Makoto Shinkai follows up his hit anime 'Your Name' with this meteorological meet-cute, in which a boy falls for a girl who can control the weather.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

‘That Christmas’ Review: From the Writer of ‘Love Actually’ Comes a Kid-Friendly Holiday Classic 4 days ago
‘Brothers’ Review: Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin Play Mismatched Twins in a Comedy Blind to Their Differences 2 weeks ago
‘Joker: Folie à Deux’s’ Fatal Flaw Is Turning the Fans Into the Villains of the Sequel 2 weeks ago

In Texas, there’s a saying that goes, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes.” All the way over in Tokyo, changing the forecast doesn’t come nearly so easy — and may even require a human sacrifice to set things right — or at least, that’s the premise of “ Weathering With You ,” an inventive romantic fantasy from director Makoto Shinkai , whose 2016 hit “Your Name” became the first anime made by someone other than Hayao Miyazaki to earn more than 10 billion yen (or $100 million) in Japan. Here, a young couple desperate to stay together find themselves contending with all manner of meteorological freakery, with spectacular, if somewhat difficult to follow, results.

As in the body-swapping sensation that preceded it, “Weathering With You” blends the emotional concerns of 21st-century teens with elaborate supernatural elements, making for a visually dazzling, narratively convoluted adventure that speaks to the younger generation, but not necessarily the world at large. While it’s exciting to see a non-Ghibli-associated talent emerge in the domain of Japanese animation, there’s a great deal that simply doesn’t translate to American audiences, who may have trouble swallowing the film’s outrageous ending and its J-poppy Radwimps score.

Latest Music Licensing Deals Underscore Social Media Giants’ Frenemy Status

Javier Ambrossi, Pedro Almodovar, Javier Calvo

Almodóvar Doc From ‘Veneno’ Creators Los Javis Headlines New Shows From Movistar Plus+

Even so, GKIDS has ambitious plans for the film, which has earned a by-no-means-unimpressive $125 million since its July 19 release in Japan, and which kicked off the L.A.-based Animation Is Film Festival last October. GKIDS will release “Weathering With You” on Jan. 17 in the States, following two nights of fan preview screenings around the country.

Popular on Variety

The tragic impossibility of true love is once again the director’s secret ingredient, as a 16-year-old runaway named Hokoda (Kotaro Daigo) falls for Hina (Nana Mori), a so-called Sunshine Girl, an exceptionally rare specimen with the power to pray away the gray skies. Her gift comes at a cost, however, and both teens realize that eventually, her ability to tame the weather will reach its limit, and she’ll levitate up into the clouds to be vaporized. Or something. (I’ve watched “Weathering With You” three times, and I still can’t make sense of the story or its arcane rules.) The point is, by the movie’s own mythology, Sunshine Girls aren’t long for this earth.

In the real world, of course, humans have zero control over the weather. Neither do filmmakers, which would make it hard to tell a story that calls for such extreme fluctuations between rain and shine via live action. On the other hand, by working in animation — specifically, a tech-forward approach in which tablets and digital tools are used to mirror the figures and style of classical hand-drawn anime — Shinkai is free to play God, conjuring whatever kind of weather patterns his story requires while dazzling us with his usual attention to lighting and landscapes.

One of Shinkai’s more impressive signatures, dating back at least to 2007’s “5 Centimeters per Second,” involves the awesome illumination of outdoor vistas in which the sun breaks through shadow and traces its way across the screen, like a theater curtain raising to reveal the world in all its splendor. Hina has the ability to make that happen, although the movie takes a while to introduce her ability, focusing first on young Hodaka.

Escaping the island where he grew up for what he imagines to be a more exciting life in Tokyo, Hodaka is standing on the deck of a ferry boat when a storm materializes directly overhead, hammering down so hard, the flash flood nearly casts the boy overboard. Instead, he’s rescued by Mr. Suga (Shun Oguri), a not-entirely-legit magazine publisher who gives Hodaka his card and, later, a job, after the kid realizes that he’s too young to get work in the big city. TV weather reports make it clear that Tokyo has been plagued by massive rains lately, and the newscasters don’t know what to make of the “fafrotskies,” or fish-like objects and strange jelly left behind by the storms. (No explanation ever comes, although we can assume Shinkai is riffing on the erratic impact of global warming.)

Countless filmmakers have offered their view of Tokyo, but Shinkai has a unique sense of the capital, and one of the movie’s more unexpected pleasures is seeing the metropolis through his eyes. From crowded neon-lit intersections to private rooftop shrines, the director captures many facets of the famous city, encompassing both the macro (fireworks over Meiji Jingu Gaien Park) and more intimate details (like the pleasures of a vending-machine feast). Hodaka meets Hina at a nondescript McDonald’s, where he finds a gun left behind by another customer, later using it to defend her from what looks to be a pimp.

Shinkai doesn’t provide enough background on either of the characters (why Hodaka leaves home, why Hina agrees to sex work), and yet, audiences will have no trouble accepting that they’re meant to be together, finding it easy to root for the couple through some of the story’s stranger turns. For example, once Hina realizes that she can override the rain, she and Hodaka decide to start a business, where clients pay her to call out the sun for sporting events, street fairs and a simple family afternoon in the park. But that incident with the gun (a bizarre subplot by any measure) attracts the police’s attention, as does Hina’s ability to harness lightning in alarmingly violent ways, and before long, they’re on the run from the authorities.

This is where “Weathering With You” proves weakest, falling back on tropes seen far too frequently in kids movies (rescuing the mermaid from researchers in “Splash,” for example), instead of charting a fresh path. Shinkai hasn’t gone far enough into fantasy to excuse the enormous holes in his script, though he does a nice job of distracting us with details, going so far as to incorporate cameo appearances by Taki and Mitsuha, the lead characters of “Your Name,” in such a way that suggests that the films may be part of an extended “Shinkai-verse.”

If that’s the case, the last act of “Weathering With You” feels all the more extreme (spoiler alert: this paragraph reveals the film’s ending). Shinkai conceived the film on the premise that average folks don’t appreciate the degree to which their emotions are influenced by the weather, nor do they realize how their individual decisions, no matter how small, may contribute to global climate change. Here, rather than accepting Hina’s fate — her sacrifice restores the weather — the couple selfishly challenge nature, to the extent that Tokyo is left permanently underwater. Romantic? Sure, though it’s no better than Jack and Rose letting everyone on the Titanic drown just so they could wind up together. There’s gotta be a better solution.

Reviewed at Animation Is Film Festival (opener), Oct. 18, 2019. (Also in Toronto, San Sebastian, Tokyo, Palm Springs film festivals.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 112 MIN.

Production: (Animated — Japan) A GKIDS (in U.S.), Toho (in Japan) release of a Toho Co., Ltd., CoMix Wave Films Inc., Story Inc., Kadokawa Corporation, East Japan Marketing & Communications Inc., Voque Ting Co., Ltd., Lawson Entertainment Inc. production. Producer: Yoshihiro Furusawa. Executive producers: Minami Ichikawa, Noritaka Kawaguchi. Co-producers: Wakana Okamura, Kinue Ito.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Makoto Shinkai. Camera: Ryôsuke Tsuda. Editor: Makoto Shinkai. Music: Radwimps.
With: Kotaro Daigo, Nana Mori, Tsubasa Honda, Sakura Kiryu , Se Hiraizmi, Yuki Kaji, Chieko Baisho, Shun Oguri.

More from Variety

‘Blade Runner 2049’ Producers Sue Elon Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery, Alleging Copyright Infringement

An Emmy statue with arrows going through it

‘Hacks’ Post-Emmys Boost Highlights Max’s HBO Problem

‘I, Robot’ Director Accuses Elon Musk of Taking His Ideas for New Tesla Robot, Van and More: ‘Hey Elon, Can I Have My Designs Back Please?’

Jon SteinlaufExecutive Vice President, Ad Sales & Marketing - Scripps Networks Interactive

Jon Steinlauf, Warner Bros. Discovery’s U.S. Ad Sales Chief, to Exit

A hand holding up a controller into the air

Why the Video Game Industry Can’t Shake Its Struggles

Jon Stewart Slams Elon Musk’s Trump Rally Appearance, Second Amendment Rhetoric: ‘Guns Don’t Protect Our Free Speech’

More from our brands, soccer mommy is driven by loss on ‘evergreen’.

Electric Air Taxis Are One Step Closer to Hitting the Skies

Ex-NBPA Lawyer: Caitlin Clark Could ‘Wield Her Power’ in CBA Talks

The Best Loofahs and Body Scrubbers, According to Dermatologists

Severance Season 2: Mark Meets His New Co-Workers (!) in Latest Teaser

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘weathering with you’ (‘tenki no ko’): film review | tiff 2019.

Top-grossing Japanese anime director Makoto Shinkai of 'Your Name' returns with another romantic fantasy film about a teenage girl who can control the weather in 'Weathering With You.'

By Deborah Young

Deborah Young

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Send an Email
Show additional share options
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest
Share on Reddit
Share on Tumblr
Share on Whats App
Print the Article
Post a Comment

A runaway boy from an island, Hodaka, and Hina, a city girl who has the ability to change the rain to sunshine, join forces in Weathering With You , Makoto Shinkai’s long-awaited anime follow-up to his 2017 Your Name . That smash hit, which became the second-highest-grossing anime film of all time after it topped $357 million worldwide, is a hard act to follow. But all things are relative: The new film has already grossed in excess of $100 million since it came out in July and is expected to top Disney’s live-action Aladdin to become Japan’s biggest theatrical release of 2019.

Weathering With You is also headed for the voracious Chinese market and is the country’s 2020 Oscar submission. GKIDS is handling North American distribution after its Toronto bow as a Special Presentation.

The Bottom Line Mostly sunny.

Once again, Shinkai takes sure aim at the teenage market and its taste for romance and magical realism. He works with many of the creators of Your Name , including producers Noritaka Kawaguchi and Genki Kawamura, animation director Masayoshi Tanaka who designed the characters in the earlier film and the Japanese rock band Radwimps for the bouncy, blasting score. All the pieces are in place for a charming tale of magical powers and the price of using them, and once again the ending revolves around an environmental disaster.

Adding it up, the film has the same charming characters and delightfully detailed pastel artwork of its predecessor, but in exchanging Your Name ’s sci-fi component for a mythical-magical story, it loses a bit of quota.

Hodaka (shrilly voiced by Kotaro Daigo) is an idealistic 16-year-old who runs away from his parents’ rural home and heads for Tokyo. He is on a ship about to be swept overboard by the typhoon he foolishly braves when a hand reaches out to grab him. Thus he meets Suga (Shun Oguri), the dashing, ironic editor of a magazine of weird tales who offers the penniless boy a job and a roof over his head.

Following the lead of Suga’s young assistant and possible girlfriend, Natsumi (Tsubasa Honda), Hodaka races around the city doing interviews with people who have had strange experiences worth writing about. Eventually he tracks down the orphan Hina (Nana Mori), a girl his age with pigtails and a gentle personality — and an uncanny ability to make it stop raining by praying. She soon becomes known as the Sunshine Girl and goes into business with Hodaka selling her power to people having weddings, family picnics or whatever else requires clear skies. It keeps food on the table for herself and her cute little brother Nagi (Sakura Kiryu).

Astounding aerial views of Tokyo vie with huge cumulus cloud formations in the sky when Hina does her tricks. In every instance, the thunderstorm clears away and rays of bright sunlight break through.

This fantasy of teenage omnipotence is countered by a warning, however: Hodaka learns that Hina’s powers are those of the mythical Japanese “Weather Maiden,” who was used in ancient times for similar purposes but who was actually a sacrificial victim. Part of her life force was used up every time she cleared the skies and let the sunshine in.

With this threat hanging over their heads, Hodaka, Hina and Nagi find themselves in new trouble because they are living without an adult guardian. Pursued by the police and the social services (shades of Shoplifters! ), they flee across the city seeking shelter from the incessant rain and cold. One of the film’s most exciting scenes, taken from action movies, is Hodaka’s daredevil escape through the streets of Tokyo on the back of a motorcycle driven by Natsumi.

This is a dark and frightening part of the film, in which fantasy dies and the stark realities of the adult world shake the defenseless young people. Hodaka proves his mettle as a fearless street fighter fixated on his goal of getting Hina back, whatever the cost. And Shinkai’s story does make him choose between dire options: the weather, or the girl he loves. Hodaka and Hina are given a trip to the clouds, where sky-bound poetry alternates with a frightening free-fall back to earth.

There is also an unmistakable environmental message for young audiences to embrace: Messing with nature has its cost. For Hina, who has been given her powers at a prayer shrine, nature is sacred. The music swells every time it looks up at the expressive, ever-changing sky with its freak weather, snow in August, flooded rivers, water bombs falling from the sky, pedestrians being knocked out by giant hail stones and a perfect storm that tears through buildings and ruins half the city. The incessant rain even threatens to turn Tokyo back into the bay it once was.

Perhaps the convention Westerners will find most difficult to adjust to is the way the dialogue is shouted with an explanation point, and Hodaka is especially irritating in his groaning gasps and hysterical demands. But the fast-moving story includes some finely conceived humor, like when Nagi’s elementary school girlfriends help him escape from child custody by switching clothes with him.

Production companies: Toho Co., Story Inc., CoMix Wave Films Cast: Kotaro Daigo, Nana Mori, Shun Oguri Director-screenwriter-editor: Makoto Shinkai Producers: Genki Kawamura, Yoshihiro Furusawa Executive producers: Minami Ichikawa, Noritaka Kawaguchi Director of photography: Ryosuke Tsuda Production designers: Hiroshi Takiguchi, Masayoshi Tanaka Animator: Atsushi Tamura Music: Radwimps Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentation) World sales: Toho Co.

111 minutes

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Lacey chabert falls for hunky snowman brought to life in netflix’s ‘hot frosty’ trailer, be afraid: what horror movies say about america, how janelle monáe became the queen of halloween, roman polanski lawsuit alleging director raped minor in 1973 has been settled, mipcom: john turturro, melissa leo films lead mediapro’s slate of english-language content, ‘grand theft hamlet,’ ‘witches’ feature on longlist for bifas raindance maverick award.

IMAGES

Movie Review: “Weathering With You”
Weathering with You Review by Lee Boardman
REVIEW
Weathering With You Movie Review: This film with its intriguing plot
Film Review
Weathering with You

VIDEO

Title: "Weathering With You: Stunning Movie Edit You Must See!"
A short video of (Weathering with you)movie like,comment and subscribe my channel #animelover #anime
weathering you #short#new#enemy#apisod
weathering with you movie review in Hindi 2023 #anime
[Movie:Weathering with You][Editing_by_DK100][#anime #edit #music #weatheringwithyou #animeedit]
weathering with you full movie in hindi dubbed