Review: Weathering With You

Dir. Makoto Shinkai (2019)

Weathering With You is the story of a runaway looking to start their new life in Tokyo and the eccentric interesting people he meets along the way. It focuses primarily on his relationship with a girl who may or may not be able to control the weather. Overall I thought it was really cute narrative, a heartfelt journey with a mystical undercurrent.

If you thought Your Name was pretty, Weathering With You is a giant leap forwards for the studio. It is a stunning film to behold. They clearly used a lot of CG models despite it being primarily a traditional-looking film, but when they were using CG components I think they did a really good job blending it into the animation. I liked the characters more than I liked the story and it's not necessarily because the story was bad. I just think the characters were so memorable, interesting, and eccentric while the actual narrative was a bit muddled. The film frequently felt like they were trying to fill space instead of add to the story, there were like five songs but it’s not exactly even a musical. Just songs over montage, like the intro sequence to an animated series. I hate when a film will flash back to something you've already seen, I think that is the definition of weak-sauce writing. If you're going to do a flashback, it should be because the character is remembering something that the audience didn’t JUST see. A flashback or montage should reward the audience with some depth or additional context instead of just showing us snippets of stuff we've already seen. The narrative also felt like it was building up this kind of underlying mythos and then it never really capitalizes on all that groundwork.

I think a lot of people might walk away from this ending particularly feeling a little underwhelmed despite how good aspects of the movie is.

This review was transcribed from a conversation between Josh Evans and Katie Rose Witherell.
The conversation took place on May 11th, 2020
The transcription and edit took place on June 15th, 2026

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