A Light Rain

A teenage boy runs away to Tokyo and meets a girl who can control the weather in 2019's Weathering with You (天気の子, lit. "Weather Child"). There are some really interesting things about this movie, particularly in the first thirty minutes, but the premise starts to get too loose for the emotional weight to hold together. The filmmakers try to compensate by pushing the music up but it just becomes loud.

Hodaka (Daigo Kotaro) is the teenage boy. We meet him reading Catcher in the Rye on a boat to Tokyo. Again, director Shinkai Makoto presents a surprisingly familiar Japan. As Hodaka wanders around Shinjuku, there were several places I remember walking past myself.

He's unable to find a decent job and can barely afford lousy accommodations. Then he finds a gun in a trash can. He uses it to scare a yakuza who's trying to force a pretty girl into sex work. There are a lot of transgressions going on here I found heartening--Hodaka is never portrayed as a bad person for running away or for reading Catcher in the Rye. I'm more ambivalent, but no less surprised, about the fact that his use of a gun is portrayed positively throughout the film (mind you, this movie came out a couple years before Abe's assassination).

The pretty girl Hodaka rescued, Hina (Mori Nana), turns out to have magical powers; she can stop the rain with her will alone. Hodaka says they ought to monetise this, and it being early August, the rainy season, they do pretty well for themselves.

The first part of the film has a slightly Oliver Twist-ish quality, improved by the lushly detailed art and realistic obstacles Hodaka faces. It's precisely these qualities that makes the film disappointing as it shifts gears to lazier writing and new concepts are thrown at the viewer instead of development. We never learn why Hodaka ran away from home, we never learn much about Hina beyond the fact that she's really sweet and has a kid brother. So when we get to the climax and they're supposed to be falling in love (of course, since this is a popular modern Japanese film, they never actually proclaim anything or consummate) there's no emotional weight. This is paired with a natural disaster aspect as the weather starts to go haywire due to Hina's tampering and, just as in Suzume, the movie unwisely avoids showing or even mentioning deaths or injuries or even expensive property destruction that occurs due to these disasters.

The animation is really good, though. If Shinkai becomes just a little more courageous, I suspect he'll make something really good in the coming years.

Weathering with You is available on Max.

X Sonnet #1810

With giant lizards crushed, the hamster wins.
We never know what beasts emerged from mice.
But questions hang as heavy marks of sins.
So many thoughts return to change a price.
Eleven drummer babies prep the meat.
You never change a purse between a friend.
Containment fails when cheaper puppets meet.
So it's a worthless straw can never bend.
Resentful spirit rain restrains the grass.
A rising green insults the falling blue.
But fearful elves traverse the flooded pass.
Among the bones. are *they* remaining true?
The mutant cakes were waiting near the boat.
The hungry watched the frisky fattened stoat.