Weathering With You

A strong modern fairy tale

The short version - this is one of the few movies I’ve seen since I’ve moved to collecting physical media of anything I care about (so, yes, I double purchase books), that I have gone ahead and purchased on disc. I’m strongly considering Belle, and as much as I enjoyed it, am not likely to buy The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - and these are all good movies.

So what is it? It’s more modern fairy tale than urban fantasy, though it could be fairly categorized as either. It’s the story of a runaway boy who finds himself adrift and at loose ends in Tokyo during an unusually rainy season, who meets a girl who can control the weather, or more specifically, make it stop raining and the sun come out.

Nothing, however, is free, and everything has a cost, whether it is something as simple as a meal, or the act of controlling the weather itself. Not all of these are immediately apparent. While it doesn’t voyeuristically dwell on gore or misery and is overall wholesome, this story also pulls few punches in the darker realities a misstep away. As such, there may be a few scenes that need to be explained to preteens - mostly due to what is implied to be going on.

The Story

Hodaka Morishima is a first-year high school student growing up on a small island, who escapes from his troubled home to Tokyo. En route, the ferry is almost swamped by a freak storm of sorts, and Hodaka is almost washed overboard, to be saved by an older man named Keisuke Suga, who offers to help him if he needs it. Hodaka however stubbornly sets out on his own and rapidly discovers that a runaway high schooler with no ID can’t find legitimate work. Homeless and hungry, he finds a handgun in the trash outside a seedy club, and is given food by Hina, a McDonald’s employee who takes pity on him. he finally looks up Suga to get a job.

Keisuke takes on Hodaka, paying him under the table, at his publishing company that reports on the unusual, a more sincere weekly world news, if you will, where they actually try and verify reports of things like “sunshine girls” before publishing them. Also living with them is Keisuke’s niece, Natsumi.

Trying to track down the story, Hodaka comes across Hina again, as she’s being coerced into a club in the red light district despite being well underage. Hodaka tries to drag her away, and is attacked by the club owner, whereupon he drags out the gun he’d found earlier, and fires it, missing the owner, but they escape.

This, and the earlier misery of Hodaka’s life on the streets, are but two examples of how the film tiptoes the line, alluding to real darkness and consequences without wallowing in it. It’s presented just creepily enough even kids can understand something is wrong, while adults and most teens will understand why. Neither grimdark nor utopian, it is a world where many people don’t care and will prey on the weak, but others also do care and try to help. While there are more shades of grey, and some people are definitely worse than others, somewhat like Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke there are few evil mustache twirling villains either.

Hina takes him to an abandoned building where Hodaka throws away the gun, realizing how bad of a mistake he nearly made. Hina then shows him a rooftop shrine where she prays and clears the sky for him. Hina does not have it easy either. She misleads Hodaka into thinking she is slightly older, but she’s actually in middle school, and living with her younger brother, orphans trying to get by. She’s lost her job at McDonalds, and is at wits end on how to continue supporting her brother. Hodaka suggests she hire herself out as a weather girl, and helps her get set up, to a good degree of success. It turns out though, that as Hina grants these prayers, she’s starting to fade away.

Again, to everything there are costs and consequences.

Meanwhile, the cops are looking for Hodaka because his parents filed a missing person report, and find him on security cameras confronting the sleazy club owner with a a gun. Eventually, they also twig to the fact that Hina and her younger brother are living without a guardian.

I’ll leave the rest be. It is a fairy tale. magic, much like in Spirited away, does what it needs to, when it does, for its own reasons, and there are marvels in this world. Even the eventual fate of Tokyo can be seen as a price paid to balance out a good thing. Perhaps our desire to control the world exceeds our grasp to do so.

Art Style

There is never the dividing line between the land of faerie and reality like in Belle. Where the character style in real world in Belle, and in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is very flat, Weathering uses a shaded look, but with a fairly limited number of tonal changes, very much reminding me of the 80’s and 90’s style shading. The backgrounds and overall animation are gorgeously painted, with CGI limited to helping water effects and changing camera angles.

The movie also did not shy away from using actual brands. I don’t know why the choice was made, but it comes across less as product placement and more as a means to ground you in the reality of the world shown through the familiar.