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「天気の子」 (Tenki no Ko)
“Weathering With You”
It’s always kind of been the case with Shinkai Makoto that his movies can be interpreted through many different lenses. From his early days working virtually solo on his Mac, where his work was the virtual private property of hardcore anime fanatics, to becoming the most powerful anime director in the world (that’s an argument to be made at least), Shinkai has always sparked intense feeling. There’s a real irony here in that the man who made his mark appealing to the most inside of audiences wound up taking anime to more viewers outside its circle than anyone since Miyazaki.
After Kimi no Na wa. became the highest-grossing anime film ever worldwide (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi barely held it off in domestic box office), whatever Shinkai did next was going to be one of anime’s biggest event films ever. In some sense, Tenki no Ko is a relatively safe follow-up. This is squarely in Shinkai’s comfort zone (and more importantly, his audience’s) – young romance at its most bittersweet, magical realism, soaring pop insert songs. But in choosing to take on the most pressing issue facing the world (though it’s never treated as such, lacking the immediacy of a pandemic), climate change, Shinkai opened himself to analysis – and criticism – on an entirely different level.
Weathering With You is the story of a 16 year-old from an unnamed island who runs away to Tokyo, Morishima Hodaka (Kotarou Daigo). Hodaka’s backstory – like much in Weathering – is left relatively unexplored. He found island life “suffocating”, but as he’s fleeing to Tokyo by ferry his face is covered in bandages – was he beaten by his father? Bullied at school? On-board ship he takes great pleasure in a freak rainstorm, but is almost washed overboard – only to be saved by a passenger named Suga Keisuke (Oguri Shun). Having seen something of himself in Hodaka Suga-san knows the basic score, here, and offers the boy his business card in case he gets in real trouble in Tokyo.
In many ways, the scenes where Hodaka tries to scrape by in Tokyo are the strongest part of the movie. They feel very real, and one gets a strong sense of Hodaka’s euphoria over being at the center of the world being worn down by grim reality. At his low ebb he hasn’t eaten for three days, and a kindly MacDonalds girl named Amano Hina (Mori Nana) takes pity on him and gives him a Big Mac (both types of Mac are omnipresent in Tenki no Ko – product placement is out of control in Shinkai world at this point). Eventually Hodaka randomly finds a gun a local hoodlum has dropped (which seems unlikely), which he uses to rescue Hina from what looks like an organized enjo-kousai ring (run by the same guy), and winds up taking refuge at Suga’s live-in office.
In this sense, everything is textbook Shinkai, as noted. All his fetishes are here – trains, clouds, snow (eventually), a cat. As opposed to Your Name, Weathering With You turns Shinkai’s impressionistic eye almost entirely on an urban landscape. And this vision of Tokyo is very different from the idealized one in Kotonoha no Niwa. This Tokyo is all about love hotels, rail yards, host clubs, wire fences, and rusted-out abandoned buildings. Visual beauty is pretty much a given with Shinkai-sensei, and Tenki no Ko delivers. If anything, it’s fascinating to see Shinkai use his considerable powers on gritty cityscapes, and they take on a hard-edged beauty that’s something quite different from what we’re used to with him.
Things get pretty complicated from here. Hina has a little brother named Nagi (Kiryu Sakura), who’s a hilariously adept grade-school Lothario, and she’s been lying about her age (including to Hodaka) to get work. She’s supporting Nagi after the death of their mother (wither Dad is another of those missing background details). Suga has a daughter living with his mother-in-law after the death of his wife, and his adult niece Natsumi (Honda Tsubasa) sticks close to him in order to try and keep him tethered to the real world. And then there’s the hook – the strange Shrine on top of an abandoned building in Shinjuku, and the stranger bargain Hina apparently makes there on the day of her mother’s passing.
The mystical conceit behind Weathering With You is going to be one of those YMMV elements, I suspect. Shinkai keeps this all pretty vague – there are mumblings of old priests and fortunetellers and mysterious 13th-century ceiling murals, but the gist of it seems to be that Hina is trading her life for every sunny day her prayers manage to procure. Which is quite a few, after Hodaka sets the trio (with little Nagi as a walking teru teru bouzu) up as a “Sunshine Girl” business. Just why Tokyo is mired in virtually non-stop rainfall to begin with is never really made clear, but this is perhaps mainly done in service of the symbolism which Shinkai is aiming for with Tenki no Ko.
I’ve seen this interpreted in many different ways. Unlike, say, the debate over whether Anno Hideaki’s Shin Godzilla is a pro-nationalist propaganda piece (it is, plainly) Weathering With You’s dots are harder to connect. I don’t think Shinkai intends it as a climate change dismissal, as some have charged. But neither does he seem to be making a profound case for climate action. The words of the old woman Tachibana Fumi (Baisho Chieko) – who seems to be the grandmother of Your Name’s Tachibana Taki (both its protagonists have cameos here) – may come closest to revealing Shinkai’s intent. She talks of a Tokyo of 200 years earlier, before so much of the bay was filled in – “In some ways, it’s just going back to how it was”.
Again, I think this can be interpreted in multiple ways. Hina and Hodaka are making a choice – her life, or a climate that submerges much of the capital. Hodaka, not knowing the truth, believes they can have it both ways. Eventually he does learn the truth, and chooses Hina over the world. Is Shinkai, as some have charged, arguing that it’s better for us to choose the practicalities of the modern world over something we can’t really change anyway? Is he preaching fatalism? I can see the case, but it doesn’t quite resonate with me. I think, rather, that Shinkai is trying to frame global warming through the lens of small heartbreaks – fireworks festival cancellations, rainy days at the park – rather than through slow-motion global catastrophe. He’s asking us to reflect on our place in nature – not resign from it.
To be sure, one could easily take away from Tenko no Ko that Shinkai sees climate change as something beyond our control. Indeed, he does consign much of the power over it to the shadows of Shintoism, and seemingly diminishes our responsibility for it (or at least, for arresting it). One thing he certainly doesn’t offer is solutions – mainly, I suspect, because he doesn’t have any. Maybe that is fatalism, but rather than telling us that we’re powerless, I think Shinkai is telling us to worry about the things we can change rather than the things we can’t.
A further irony, then, is that while this is Shinkai’s most socially-conscious film and that it takes a broadly pessimistic slant in that arena, in terms of romance it’s arguably his most innocent and optimistic. Hodaka and Hina are much more straightforward characters than Taki and Mitsuha, and the obstacles they must overcome – while formidable – much more straightforward as well. There are some definite misses on the plotting side – the whole recurring bit with the revolver and the cops fell flat for me, for example. But I really liked Hina and Hodaka, and I appreciate (as always) seeing actors almost exactly the same age as their characters in this sort of story. Both Kotarou and Mori are wonderful in these roles, and that’s a saving grace for the personal and romantic story in Tenki no Ko.
I won’t say anything so trite as “what you take away from Weathering With You depends on what you bring into it”, but it’s definitely a film that leaves much to the interpretation of the viewer. Strictly as a movie it’s certainly less polished and ambitious than Your Name, but for me it’s also more unpretentious and emotionally honest. I think Shinkai in his last few films is too obviously trying to deliver what he thinks his audience expects a “Shinkai movie” to be. He’s largely succeeded (he’s gotten very good at it) but has lost some of his authenticity and personal touch in the process. Rougher and more awkward, less accomplished than its most recent predecessors, Weathering With You to me feels like a half-step in the opposite direction – and for me, that half-step is a positive one.
This makes me want to rewatch it again.
If this movie was set in the US, Hodaka would be dead. Actually, I think he should be dead once he pointed the gun at the police.
I thought the exact same thing when I saw that scene in theaters. I was like, whoa, the cops aren’t shooting him? Only in Japan.
Actually, in Japan it’s very rare for cops to carry firearms.
@Guardian Enzo. That’s right. I totally forgot about that. Well, in the end Tenki no Ko is a movie and movies will have a certain amount of creative license.
Also @Guardian Enzo. As someone living in Japan, do you know if Japanese audiences called BS on Hodaka randomly finding a gun? I live in the US, a country flooded with guns, so finding a random gun isn’t that uncommon (well, it does depend on the state). However, isn’t Japan known for its draconian gun laws and yearly firearm-related deaths in the single digits? I guess the whole gun story line felt off to me from that perspective.
Aside from the whole gun story line that felt a bit forced and out of place, I loved Tenki no Ko overall. I’ve been following Makoto Shinkai since watching Hoshi no Koe in my college days. I will say, I didn’t like all of his movies. I personally disliked the bitter sweet (mostly bitter) 5 Centimeters per Second and Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo (story direction was messy). Aside from those two duds in my book, I’ve enjoyed all of his other full-length movies. Tenki no Ko has joined my list of top favorite anime movies.
Now I just have to decide if I should preorder the standard blu ray edition or the 4k blu ray collectors edition even though I don’t have a 4k player or a 4k tv…
Yes, there was some commentary on how unlikely that was. For context, the U.S. averaged about 12.2 gun-related deaths per 100K inhabitants in 2017, and Japan averaged 0.06 (0.00 were homicides). Handguns are very, very rare here in any context – crime or otherwise.
Maybe the cops weren’t confident in actually hitting him??? Maybe just scared? I would shoot first and ask questions later if someone pointed a gun at me.
I wanna ride on the Yamanote Boat line.
Well, you can ride on the Himiko – the Matsumoto Leiji-themed Sumida River ferry. I have a post on that on LiA somewhere.
I thought RC does not do movie entries anymore.
There are quite a few movies out there like the recent Kyoani movies featuring Violet Evergarden and Hibike Euphonium. I know many RC writers adore these two shows, so I’m surprised no one has written about it.
Honestly just down to time for most of us. We do love a lot of series and always strive to do movie posts, but the uncertain timing of sub releases and personal schedules often conflict and lead to a lot of things unfortunately falling through the cracks,
I hope that one day you’ll review Maquia.
I did see it… Pretty good on the whole, definitely Okada in earnest mode.
How about Liz and the Blue Bird?
A bunch of the scenes reminded me of eureka seven.
Wow. There’s a lot to unpack in this review. Let me just say this first:
It was cute and adorable….and fun.
When I first heard of the film coming out, I thought that it was rather soon compared to Your Name. Then again, I didn’t really have a good idea of how long movies tend to take, so what do I know. Nevertheless, despite what I thought was a short time, I was a little afraid that Tenki no Ko would be compared to Your Name, so much that it wouldn’t be able to stand out on its own. I’ll admit though, thanks to Your Name, I had some strong to high expectations for this.
When I watched Your Name for the first time, I did my best to avoid spoilers to get a genuine feeling for it as I watched it, and I did the same for Tenki No Ko. Thanks to that, I really enjoyed my time watching it. I must say though, Once again, the soundtrack was gorgeous at times, especially the fireworks scene. Whenever I listen to it again, I always imagine the viewpoint of something flying over the night sky of Tokyo, being lit up by the fireworks in a heavenly ensemble.
While I understood that Shinkai tried to incorporate elements of the weather and climate change in the film, I wasn’t really drawn into it. That’s not to say that I didn’t notice it or thought that it was a bad idea. I thought it was a great idea. I guess I was more focused on character relationships. The dynamic between Hodaka and the Amano siblings was delightful, and the interactions between Suga and Hodaka really show how similar they are with one’s outlook being annealed by time and responsibilities. Some aspects of the film storywise felt out of place, like how Hodaka found a gun and how there was no backstory as to exactly why he ran away from home (also, not to mention how the first thing that came to his mind was that Natsuki was a mistress – what kind of place does he think Tokyo is?). Then again, if I focused too much on that, I’d never be able to enjoy the film as much as I would have, so it’s easy to give them a pass.
I enjoyed the film, but I have to say that it didn’t exactly resonate with me the way Your Name did. At the end of Your Name, I had a feeling that I really, REALLY wanted to watch it again (with someone else). Ultimately, that never happened, but with Tenki no Ko, I didn’t have that feeling this time around. Perhaps it’s like what Guardian alluded to in the post above, with Shinkai trying a tad too hard to retain the magic found in his previous films (succeeding in some aspects but losing some of his authenticity and personal touch along the way). It’s certainly there, but from another viewpoint, perhaps due to the success of Your Name, it feels ‘mainstream’. If Tenki no Ko wasn’t associated with Shinkai, then I wouldn’t mind it, but after seeing his previous films (5 Centimeters per Second is my favorite), mainstream would not be how I would describe him. That’s not necessarily a totally bad thing, Your Name felt mainstream up until the plot twist, so being mainstream isn’t bad. Maybe I’m just nitpicking here. I’m trying to say that despite a shade of being mainstream, perhaps even more obvious than Your Name, this is totally a Shinkai film and really enjoyable.
All in all, I really enjoyed this film. I may have harped on this idea of the film being mainstream too much, but that does not detract at all from my overall experience of the film. I liked it, I had fun watching it, and I want to watch it again.
With a comment that thoughtful, you’d think you’d want to put a name on it!
In a way, I’m trying to reduce my internet footprint. It’s surprising how easy it is to Google yourself and the info that’s out there.
Also, because I forgot to add on, I felt rather optimistic at the end of the film. Let’s see how it holds up in a few months.
It’s a little surprising as to how little discussion there is on this film out there, especially regarding the themes that Makoto Shinkai were going for, but fortunately, there are others who have stepped up to providing a comprehensive and insightful outline of what Tenki no Ko was aiming for.
From the linked review, the theme is NOT about climate change, but rather, about notions of responsibility and resilience born from human connections. This is something that I found a lot of reviews written by the bigger players to have completely missed, so it’s nice to finally read some thoughts from those who can write with a more personal touch.
This is a great thing, I think everyone feels this information is very valuable, thank you
Dropping this so people know how screen caps were obtained so far ahead of the BD/DVD releases:
This post was not the result of having access to a screener’s cut or anything of that sort, it was possible because of an online stream. Personally, I would’ve been okay had you waited until the BDs to post this review, it’s not like two weeks would make that big of a difference.