Tag: Makoto Shinkai

Weathering With You (Tenki no ko)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A bravura opening shot pulls from rainswept Tokyo in through a hospital window to a girl waiting by a patient’s bedside, recalling nothing so much as the heroine of everyone’s favourite anime identity thriller Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) reflected against a train carriage window with a Tokyo cityscape visible beyond, but where Kon uses such imagery as an entry point to multilayered realities, Weathering With You’s vision never really extends beyond trying to recreate and repeat the formula that rendered its director’s previous Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) such a runaway success.

Like Your Name, Weathering With You centres on a teenage boy/girl romance but instead of the gender body swap and time travel devices in the earlier film – which probably shouldn’t have worked but somehow did – Weathering has an equally flimsy plot device about a girl named Hina who possesses the ability to turn rain into sunshine. This is set against a far more interesting backdrop of Tokyo being permanently shrouded in rain with echoes of global warming thrown in for the closing epilogue, two years after the main story, in which large parts of the city have disappeared beneath the rising sea level.

Most of the film centres around 16 year old runaway Hodaka who has come to Tokyo presumably to escape the type of small town existence portrayed in the rural sections of Your Name as Shinkai tries desperately not to repeat himself, a goal at which he succeeds admirably for about the first reel or so, arguably Weathering’s most engaging section. An early highlight during Hodaka’s inbound ferry journey sees him rush onto deck just in time to be caught in an exhilarating downpour only to be saved from being swept away by the swift action of unkempt, grownup Kei who subsequently gives the boy his card and tells him to get in touch if he ever needs help.

Hodaka knows better, so walks away – but after living as a homeless person on Tokyo’s mean and rainswept streets for a while and being unable to secure work to support himself because of Japan’s stringent minimum working age laws, he changes his mind and ends up the technically illegal and poorly paid if housed and fed dogsbody at Kei’s magazine publishing company where alongside a young woman named Natsumi he starts to research supernatural and paranormal stories for possible publication.

Kei sends Hodaka out to investigate the phenomenon of the sunshine girl, who can temporarily cause the rain to stop and the sun to come out, in turn pushing the plot towards boy meets girl romance when Hodaka befriends sunshine girl Hina and her primary school age little brother Nagi. Here Weathering repeats Your Name’s teen romantic clichés without holding the audience’s attention quite as effectively.

Shinkai also falls back on a visual, fantasy device, a temple which turns out to be a portal to another world where Hina floats in the sky as if underwater surrounded by mysterious shoals of sky (or are they sea?) fish. Your Name cleverly wove its not dissimilar visual conceits into a complex tapestry but Weathering can’t quite to pull its various constituent parts together, leaving the viewer to founder somewhat even as he or she admires its more impressive elements.

However the rain and sunshine imagery, while it may be a sideshow to the main romantic event, proves itself a considerable and genuinely captivating asset. Much artistry has gone into animating rain dripping down window panes or splashing in multiple drops onto pavement surfaces – and there are a great many such sequences. Equally, when Hina halts the rain for a few hours which she does with Hodaka as they attempt to earn a little extra money, the blue sky, sunshine and bright light provide a welcome contrast to the constant downpour and drab colour elsewhere.

The final flooding of Tokyo builds effectively on all this, but sadly it’s too little, too late. You can’t help feeling that far more could have been done with this flooding concept in both script and overall design. Despite the promise of that opening shot, Weathering ultimately fails to deliver the multiple reality levels of Kon’s Perfect Blue. Worse, it never integrates its ideas into a coherent whole the way Shinkai’s own, earlier and superior Your Name did while its romance simply isn’t as engaging. A great pity.

Weathering With You is out in the UK on Friday, January 17th (2019). On Sky Cinema and NOW TV on February 3rd (2021).

Your Name (Kimi no Na wa)

Posted on by mjbstaging

In a spectacular and bravura single take, vertical panning shot, a meteor descends from the heavens through the clouds towards the small lakeside town of Itomori. Then, another time, another place: on a train in Tokyo a teenage girl spots a boy and their eyes meet but there’s no time to exchange names. She knows him but he has no idea who she is. As she gets off the train, he asks her… “Your Name?”

Thereafter, Tokyo boy Taki wakes up some days Mitsuha’s body, and the other way round. Soon, each starts writing the other messages on their hands, arms and mobile phones so that the other one knows what he/she has been up to while they swapped bodies. Until one day, her messages stop.

Like the falling meteor which unexpectedly splits into a shower, at once a beautiful display in the Tokyo night sky and an impending disaster in Itomori, this weaves together two ways of looking. Girl and boy. Countryside and city. Celebration and catastrophe. As a ribbon snakes through space and meteor fragments fall through the atmosphere, a thread weaves through a loom meshing separate timelines. When the two teens meet at the beginning, she is near the end of their encounter while he is at its start thanks to subtle storytelling sleight-of-hand. They may not both know each other yet, but they are connected. When finally they meet again on urban Tokyo hillside steps, the moment is poignant.

Although the meteor is expected to fall in one piece, at the last minute it splits into fragments, one of which will wipe out Itomori. After learning through Taki that this will happen, can Mitsuha and her friends alert the town – busy celebrating its annual festival – to evacuate before lives are lost?

Japanese films have dealt with disaster for a long time, most notably in Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954) which turned the devastation of the A-bomb into the eponymous, city-wasting monster. Recent reboot Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016) shows the franchise still capable of delivering such myth and metaphor.

Not that Your Name is necessarily about nuclear strikes. Japan has a long history of earthquakes and associated natural disasters, most recently the 2011 tsunami and resultant damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Life goes on but such disastrous events linger in the national psyche and inform popular culture. Even as Your Name absorbs Itomori’s annihilation into its wider culture as a pretty light show over Tokyo, it grapples with the magnitude of the disaster by placing us in the immediate days and hours beforehand.

Elsewhere, Your Name plays out as both teen romance and dual exploration of male/female identity. The two protagonists wake up separately in each other’s bodies to discover with a mixture of delight and embarrassment that they possess the genitals of the opposite sex. As the twin narratives move on to explore more psychological sexual differences, the body swap device proves genuinely affecting. By the time of the impending annihilation of Mitsuko’s home town, you’re completely hooked.

It’s one of those rare movies to watch multiple times. If, like this writer, you saw it last year in a small cinema, to catch the new digital IMAX print on a bigger sized screen is a real treat. While scenes with minimal detail and movement show up the fact, other sequences are all the more effective. This applies not only to the big outdoors vistas where you’d expect it but also more intimate, everyday scenes. In short, compared to much smaller screens, the IMAX format allows Your Name’s visuals the room they need to breathe.

Your Name is out in the UK on Wednesday, August 23rd.

For another animation about Japanese life against the backdrop of impending disaster, click here.