On Weathering with You
Contains spoilers for: Weathering with You
One of my fears as a writer is that all of my writing will feel the same: the narrative voice, the small details I use to breathe life into a character, the patterns of my sentences. I’ve read works where I can immediately identify who wrote them because the writing style is the exact same. Sometimes it’s fine; other times I can’t help but feel like the work loses impact if you’ve already read many of the same author’s past works.
That’s exactly how I felt about Weathering with You (Tenki no Ko). It is more or less a clone of Makoto Shinkai’s hit Your Name (Kimi No Na Wa). Both films use Japanese pop music to make scenes more poignant–scenes that could otherwise be interpreted as cliché. Both use the exact same rapid-scene-playthrough (waking up, using the restroom, making breakfast) to show the passage of time and assimilation into a daily routine. Both films have fairly lengthy running scenes at the height of conflict where the character needs to get somewhere in a limited amount of time; the running left me more exhausted than tense this time around. Even some of the dialogue is the exact same (enunciated in the same way) as that in Your Name. I found Weathering with You’s resemblance to Your Name so uncanny that I couldn’t take many moments in the film seriously.
When I first watched Your Name, I praised its beautiful art and its ability to whisk its audiences away into a dreamy world, permitting viewers to ignore plot holes in favor of the romantic themes of fate, love, etc. Unfortunately, while the animation was still beautiful, Weathering with You failed to do the same.
I couldn’t overlook the lack of background story behind our protagonist Hodaka, who supposedly ran away from home because it felt too isolated. The audience is left without a concrete reason why, only an abstract feeling of “stuffiness”, and I am left wondering what drove Hodaka to make such a drastic decision. If it was truly just a bike ride where he wanted to outrace the clouds and catch up to the sun, Hodaka’s character loses most of the substance necessary to make him a person rather than a tool to execute plot points. Humans can be romantic, but not that romantic, and for a film to hit me hard emotionally, I need it to be grounded in some form of reality where it can first take hold. (Kind of ironic considering how photorealistic Shinkai’s artwork is).
Hina’s background story has similar holes. The movie glosses over her mother’s death, the catalyst behind Hina gaining her weather-controlling abilities. While Hina’s mother isn’t the focus of the story (in fact, we never even see her mother’s face), I have a problem with using something as heavy as death purely as a plot point. We only see how Hina reacts to the death logistically–trying to raise her brother and herself on her own, faking her age so she can get a job at McDonald’s, etc. Any elicited emotional reaction is mostly a result of Hodaka. When Hina is spirited away as a sacrifice to stop the rain, I wasn’t attached enough to her character to empathize with Hodaka’s sorrow. By not giving much screen time to Hina’s mother, Weathering with You misses a chance to make Hina a more complex, less cookie-cutter-good-girl-love-interest type of character. As a counterexample, the anime Your Lie in April (Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso) does a brilliant job at examining Kousei’s relationship with his mother and how that affects his personal development and his relationship with Kaori.
Hodaka eventually rescues Hina. Without the human sacrifice, the torrent of rain resumes. Three years later, the unending rain has submerged parts of Tokyo. To my befuddlement, characters who have huge stakes in the sun coming out (ie. Keisuke who was forbidden from seeing his asthma-ridden daughter unless the rain stopped) seem to completely flip their views by the end. Keisuke even tells Hodaka that it wasn’t his and Hina’s fault for the perpetual rain and the world was just “crazy”. I’m still trying to decipher Shinkai’s direction to support two teenagers’ decision to maintain their relationship at the cost of rain flooding Tokyo. Was Shinkai excusing their actions with a blanket statement that the world is unpredictable? Did he want to say that climate change is just the world being crazy as usual and humans aren’t at fault? Or did he want to warm the viewers’ hearts with a display of love-at-all-costs?
I wished the themes and story were more intellectual and fleshed out. The story’s fantastical elements provide more leeway in creating explanations: it’s your world, so if you can’t find a scientific reason, make up some more (reasonable in the context) stuff. Even then, we get very little about the weather maiden, why she needs to be sacrificed, and how humans are connected to the sky. In other instances where we get interesting details that I think will come into play later in the story, they turn out to be red herrings never to be mentioned again.
Things I liked about the film? It was, like all Makoto Shinkai films, beautiful and surreal. In some instances, the music and animation are especially well-coordinated, like when the fish swim in the cumulonimbus clouds or when Hina stands on a bridge and prays for the rain to stop and the clouds part for the sun to shine through. I appreciated the artistic attention to detail, from the surprising variety of love hotels in Kabukicho to Hina’s instant ramen dish preparation. I enjoyed almost all of the side characters’ quirks and habits.
Overall, however, I was distracted.
I was distracted by questions about characters, by my growing incredulity at how similar so many moments were to those in Your Name, by the morally ambiguous themes that had me thinking about gun usage and abandoned children and teenage relationships and floods–and maybe these elements would have worked better together had the characters been better realized.
I was so distracted that even the stunning animation couldn’t win me over this time.
