Makoto Shinkai Retrospective: Weathering With You
With this, I finally come to the end of my detailed retrospective on the anime film-directing career of famed creator Makoto Shinkai. The critically-acclaimed Suzume (2022) was his most recent movie, and his previous work was 2019’s Weathering With You, which assumed the unenviable job of succeeding his breakout hit your name.
I previously reviewed Weathering With You in early 2020 during its initial UK theatrical release, so I prevaricated over whether to include it in this retrospective, because I’d already covered it. However, considering how closely linked it is thematically with both its preceding and anteceding films, plus the fact that the manga adaptation and Shinkai’s own novelisation are both now available in English, it seems unwise to forgo the chance at a second appraisal, in its updated context.
To avoid retreading old ground, this won’t be a re-review of the movie. My feelings on Weathering With You haven’t changed much since my original article. I liked it a lot then, I still like it a lot now. On balance, I think your name. is the superior movie, but Weathering With You still stands head and shoulders above most other recent anime films in terms of entertainment value, thematic interest, stunning technical achievement and sheer beauty.
What mostly interests me is in the evolution of Shinkai’s themes in his three most recent films, and his gradual abandonment of his biggest obsession — ill-fated teenage love, frustrated by distance and time. With Voices of a Distant Star he set out with a short statement of intent to explore yearning and separation. The Place Promised in Our Early Days stretched this out to feature-length, and with 5cm Per Second he refined his theme at the expense of featuring infuriatingly passive characters essentially doing nothing but moping for an hour.
With Children Who Chase Lost Voices he took a detour into Ghibli-homage territory, with death as the main instigator of separation, and romance only a tiny component of the whole. Garden of Words returned to romance, but this time the separation was an age-gap power-imbalance relationship. With your name. he truly perfected his mix of teenage longing, otherworldly wonder and supernatural separation, and made the film he’d been building his whole career towards. After producing that nearly flawless masterpiece, it was unlikely he’d ever match it — but he gave it one hell of a try anyway.
Weathering With You does have a strong romantic component — but this time the central characters spend much of their time together, and only in the final third of the film are they torn apart. Rather than emulating the rage-inducing passivity of 5cm’s protagonists, Weathering With You’s Hodaka literally moves Heaven and Earth to win Hina back from her supernatural fate. The later Suzume also features similarly supernatural separation, but it barely functions as a romance, and Shinkai is on record stating that what minimal romance content is there, he was forced to include by his producers. Shinkai clearly recognises he’s done all he can with his previous obsessions, and he’s desperate to move on.
With your name., Weathering With You, and Suzume, we see Shinkai introduce and explore new themes — primarily the effect of natural disasters upon Japanese society and individuals, and to do this he integrates many aspects of traditional Japanese religious beliefs — both Buddhist and Shinto. (Contrary to popular Western assumptions, Shinto is not just a local Japanese interpretation of Buddhism — it’s a separate belief system altogether, though culturally practices from both are often melded and syncretised.) Weathering With You in particular references the primarily Buddhist Obon festival that focuses on the veneration of ancestor spirits.
In the novel version of your name., Shinkai himself states that after the first Itomori lake meteorite fell hundreds of years previously, the locals abandoned the worship of their previous god because he had “failed” them, and began worshipping his enemy instead. Shinto deities are tied to the land, are often selfish, or at least capricious and unpredictable, and worship is offered more for appeasement to keep on the god’s good side, than what followers of Western Judeo/Christian/Islamic religions might understand of the term.
Suzume’s Daijin is a good example of a Shinto spirit — neither good nor bad, but unpredictable, and drawn to wherever his whims take him. The cosmology of Weathering With You is similarly non-anthropocentric — mankind exists in a tiny realm sandwiched between land and sky, and the weather does not exist to satisfy our puny concerns. Multiple allusions are made throughout the film to the concept of human sacrifices to keep the world in balance, with Hina’s use of her “Sunshine Girl” powers gradually eating away at her life, and only with her death/subsumption of her being to the sky will the eternal rainfall cease. There’s no option of bargaining with an absent intelligent creator deity, there’s no rhyme nor reason that Hina was “chosen”, it’s a fact of life. Just like local guardian spirits form in certain areas from animals, trees, or mountains, sometimes random people become the necessary conduits between Heaven and Earth, merely due to happenstance or meeting certain obscure criteria.
Both Weathering and Suzume feature enormous dragons whose movements prefigure massive destruction — in Weathering they are water spirits who drench the world below, in Suzume it’s a massive underground worm that wreaks havoc with earthquakes when it rampages. Such events are indiscriminate and apparently random, and Shinto attempts to explain them as the actions of unknowable, erratic and destructive gods, who are as much part of the physical world as the spriritual. Human beings are tiny in comparison to such massive creatures, and only in exceptional circumstances can individual humans like Suzume or Hodaka make a difference. Even your name.’s Taki only alters the timeline and saves Mitsuha’s town with vaguely-explained spiritual aid, even then it’s hardly clear if the town’s guardian spirit is actually helping or not. (Fun note — I never realised on first watch, but both protagonists from your name. — Taki and Mitsuha — cameo separately in Weathering With You — and Shinkai’s own novelisation confirms their marriage.
Shinkai’s main “inspiration” for his focus on disasters is the 2011 Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami, one of the worst on record (covered in more detail in my review of Suzume), and with each film since he’s only become more blatant about it. Whereas with Suzume, eventually the disasters are averted (through Daijin’s eventual sacrifice), in Weathering With You the opposite occurs — disaster comes as Hodaka is unwilling to sacrifice his love Hina for the sake of the city. Although the adults around him (primarily Keisuke) admonish him for his belief in his responsibility for the drowning of a third of Tokyo, both he and Hina are aware of their complicity and must live with that knowledge for the rest of their lives.
But Hina never chose to be a sacrifice, and why should she have to give up her life for others? Shinkai’s conclusion to the film is almost flagrant in its refutation of traditional Japanese social ideology, where society’s cohesion is prioritised above individuality. It’s fascinating that he chose this “selfish” ending, and it’s telling that in the afterword to his novel, he writes about how he agonised over the final scenes, before finally settling on the ending inspired by the lyrics of Radwimps’ closing song We’ll Be Alright (Movie Edit).
Shinkai’s novel is the fourth time he’s novelised one of his own movies, after 5cm per Second, Garden of Words and your name. He completed it a couple of months prior to the movie itself, and novel and film were released concurrently in Japan. As with all of Shinkai’s novels so far, reading it provides much in the way of extra details, backstory and character motivation — though not as much as in his exceptional Garden of Words novel. Essentially what we have in this book is the movie transcribed onto the page with some beautifully evocative, descriptive language, and more in-depth dialogue. There isn’t much in the way of extra scenes — only expanded ones, and there are few world-shattering revelations not easily inferred from watching the movie closely.
What it does do is bring some subtext into text, for example when we first see Hodaka on the boat running away from home, his face is covered in sticking plasters. Although not confirmed in the movie, in the book he plainly states that his father has hit him at least once in the past. Even if this isn’t the primary reason for him running away from home, it’s a huge contributing factor. (Hodaka himself states his reason is that he “couldn’t breathe” at home on the island.) There’s also substantially more explanation of Keisuke and Natsuke’s slightly screwed-up family dynamics. The novel isn’t as essential a read as Shinkai’s Garden of Words novel, but it’s short, and it’s fascinating to read the director’s prose take on his own movie.
Weathering With You’s manga is pretty decent. It’s in three volumes, and illustrated by Watari Kubota, an artist who doesn’t seem to have done a whole lot else that I can see, apart from a single one-shot manga Hebi no Yama (Snake Mountain). The manga hews very close to the movie, with one or two extra little scenes here and there, including some short-lived conflict between Hodaka and Hina that wasn’t in the film, and the art is surprisingly good. For once, the manga characters look very close to their animated counterparts, and the backgrounds are very accomplished. Again, it’s not an essential read, but it’s a pleasant and accurate adaptation.
Weathering With You suffers primarily from immediately following Shinkai’s masterwork your name. It’s not helped by its thematic similarities and rehashed romantic separation theme. It’s encouraging that the subsequent Suzume tries to distance itself from romance as much as Shinkai’s producers would allow, here’s hoping that with whatever his next work is that he can finally transcend the chains that bind him and produce something truly unique and wonderful.
Weathering With You
Written, directed and edited by: Makoto Shinkai
Produced by: Wakana Okamura and Kinue Ito
Studio: CoMix Wave Films
Music by: Radwimps
Japanese cinematic release: 19th July 2019
UK Blu-ray/DVD release: 28th Sept 2020
Distributor: GKIDs (US), Anime Limited(UK)
Languages: Japanese audio with English subtitles, English audio
Runtime: 112 minutes
BBFC Rating: 12
Weathering With You (novel)
Written by: Makoto Shinkai
JP publication: 18th July 2019
JP publisher: Kadokawa
ISBN: 978–4–0410–2640–3
US publication: 17th Dec 2019
US publisher: Yen Press
Translator: Taylor Engel
Page count: 184
ISBN: 978–1–9753–9936–8
Weathering With You (manga — 3 volumes)
Story by: Makoto Shinkai
Art by: Watari Kubota
JP publication: 22nd Nov 2019–23rd Oct 2020
JP publisher: Kodansha (Monthly Afternoon)
ISBN: 978–4–06–517514–9, 978–4–06–519396–9, 978–4–06–520968–4
US publication: 1st Sept 2020 — 1st June 2021
US publisher: Vertical
Translator: Melissa Tanaka
Page count: 196, 192, 192
ISBN: 978–1–94–998083–7, 978–1–94–998084–4, 978–1–64–729009–2
