Hina.īut this is also Shinkai’s darkest iteration of Tokyo. Makoto Shinkai, Weathering with You, 2019, DCP, color, sound, 112 minutes. When Hina prays for sun until it finally sets the skyline aglow, the verisimilitude holds. Weathering’s landscape is based on the psychogeographies of its director, who still draws his own storyboards a crew mapped the city by helicopter, and a four-story McDonald’s, located in the Kabukichō district, features prominently.

Your Name, released in 2016, is the highest-grossing anime movie ever as of last week, Weathering, which received an Oscar nod for best international feature, is the sixth highest, and the fourteenth highest-grossing non-English film ever. This twinning of obsessive realism with real magic is Shinkai’s specialty, and it has secured the critical and commercial success of his films. His characters’ interdimensional dreams, talismans-such as the Japanese teru teru bōzu dolls that are said to invoke sunny days-and microwavable snacks are all limned with sublime details almost true enough to touch. Here, devotion is permitted to travel the inconceivable distance between heaven and earth, while science fiction and quotidian incident are in visual unison. Shinkai traffics in such stories of youthful love either across, in spite of, or sweetly subjugating time and space. “I want you more than any blue sky,” he declares to Hina, who, alas, exists mostly through his gaze. Above all, it’s a romance, guided by the besotted Hodaka. Weathering’s Japanese title, Tenki no Ko, translates to “child of weather,” and Shinkai has repeatedly told interviewers that the story, though not intentionally didactic, was inspired by climate change. Their meddling brings balance, until it, too, must be corrected-Sunshine Girls and Rain Girls, or weather maidens, belong ultimately to the heavens. If the weather becomes chaotic, a fortune-teller reveals early on, more Sunshine Girls are born, who maintain a lifelong spiritual connection to the sky. The night is so clear because Hina is a Sunshine Girl, capable of praying away clouds. “The way the sky looks can move you so much,” Hodaka says. The film’s two teenaged leads, runaway Hodaka (Kotaro Daigo) and orphan Hina (Nana Mori), are in love. FOR HOW MANY EONS have humans looked to the firmaments-for dreaming, for communion with the departed-while they were really looking within? A third of the way through Weathering with You (2019), a film of remarkable beauty by anime auteur Makoto Shinkai, we’re gliding through Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien Fireworks Festival, as each CGI explosion sprinkles twinkling lights like pixie dust over a lambent, lifelike Tokyo.

Weathering with you tenki no ko 2019