ANI-MOVIES, *Weathering With You

After the international gold mine that Your Name gained, creator Makoto Shinkai, followed this up with another modern day romantic fantasy. Weathering With You instead of using elements of time dialation like several of Shinkai's titles went for a film with magical elements mixed in with urban living. In fact, Weathering With You takes place during You Name as sort of a spinoff-midqual where it's two main characters make cameos, even though its hinted that both titles don't take place in the exact same universe and/or timeline.

Set in the far off future of 2021(?), teenager Hodaka runs away from his home on one of the remote Japanese islands to Tokyo, for which he was thoroughly financially prepared for, manages to get a job working for a small tabloid publisher named Keisuke, who also happened to save Hodaka's life on his boat rider over to the mainland. Among his reports for the magazine, Hadaka investigates the possiblity of a so called "sunshine girl" that can prey for the rain to temporarily depart, and this leads him to a girl named Hina who had previously offered him a free meal while he was still looking for work. Hina lives with her younger brother Nagisa(who is also a criminal mastermind!)after their mother passed away a year ago, but Hina somehow gained the ability to wish for the sun to appear during rainstorms after finding a secluded temple on the roof of an old building. Hadaka opens up a website for Hina to charge people for making it sunny during certain events. This has a negative effect on Hina though as each time she uses her power, it causes her to slowly be spirited away as a sacrifice to whatever divine force she is connected to. Police investigating Hodaka's running away soon catch up to him, and soon threaten to have Hina get removed from her apartment with her brother, so the three runaways try to avoid being detained. While on the run, the weather in Tokyo becomes worse going from flooding rain to snow in the middle of summer. Hina realizes the weather is going haywire because she needs to give herself over to the heavens, and is raptured away during the night. Hodaka now has to fight the police chasing him in order to reach the mysterious temple Hina first went to in an attempt to get her back.

There was a signifigant amount of "Shinkai-isms" in this movie, with several musical montages done to pad out the movie, each one seems like the opening titles of an ongoing anime series, so if you're not big into J-Pop you might want to fast forward these parts. Another trait borrowed Shinkai's niche for having the two protaginists having to overcome a monumental force which keeps the starcrossed lovers apart. The animation involved is profoundly exceptional, especially in the scenery with gratuitous amounts of "weather porn". A few of the slightly annoying problems though are in the plot, leaving out key details, like why Hodaka was so adament about running away from home, or why Hina wasn't willing to accept outside help after her mother's death. If these slight story complications won't hold you back from enjoying an otherwordly love story, then this is an urban fairy tale even non-otaku should be interested in.