Weathering With You Review: Makoto Shinkai's Rain-Soaked Gamble on Love Over the World

Story & Premise

Hodaka runs away from his claustrophobic island home to Tokyo, which promptly chews him up -- broke, sleeping rough, turned away everywhere until a chain-smoking magazine editor named Keisuke Suga hands him a cot and a job writing up occult rumors. The rain never stops. Then he meets Hina, a bright, self-possessed girl scraping by to raise her younger brother Nagi, who carries an impossible gift: she can clear the sky at will. The two turn her power into a scrappy little 'sunshine girl' business, delivering pockets of blue to weddings, flea markets, and rooftop parties. It's a wonderful, low-stakes stretch -- until Shinkai reveals what Hina's gift actually costs. A runaway-teen premise that could have stayed cozy curdles into something with teeth: a stray handgun, a police manhunt, and a supernatural bargain that weighs a single life against the fate of a whole city. The setup is pure fairy tale; the stakes are anything but.

Characters

Hodaka is a harder sell than Your Name's Taki -- moodier, more impulsive, occasionally infuriating in the way real teenagers are. Stick with him and the recklessness reads as heartbreak: a kid nobody listens to, grabbing at the one good thing he's found. Hina is the film's gravity. Masayoshi Tanaka designs her with a warmth that makes her poise and her hidden fear equally legible, and her fierce devotion to little Nagi -- a pint-sized ladies' man who nearly steals the movie -- grounds the fantasy in a genuinely tender found-family unit. The supporting cast pulls its weight, too: Suga, whose gruffness hides real grief, and his sharp-tongued niece Natsumi give the adult world texture. There's even Ame, a rain-day stray cat, plus blink-and-miss cameos from a certain body-swapping pair that reward franchise fans without demanding recognition. Not everyone runs deep, but the central trio's bond is strong enough to make the finale's terrible question feel personal rather than abstract.

Animation & Sound

This is the reason to see it on the biggest screen you can find. CoMix Wave Films renders Tokyo with an almost uncomfortable photoreality -- wet asphalt smeared with neon, raindrops beading on train windows, sodium light bleeding through low cloud -- then animates rain with a tactility few studios have ever matched. Water has weight here; it sheets, splatters, pools, and finally rises. When Hina parts the clouds, the sudden shaft of sunlight lands like physical relief, the whole frame exhaling. It's jaw-dropping, frame for frame some of the most beautiful animation you will ever see. RADWIMPS return from Your Name and score the film like a stadium act, their surging pop-rock anthems welded to montage after montage. When it works -- the giddy first flights of Hina's power -- it's euphoric. When it doesn't, a song can steamroll a quiet moment that wanted room to breathe. Love it or resist it, the audiovisual craft operates at a level almost no one else on Earth is reaching.

Themes & What Sets It Apart

Beneath the romance, Weathering With You is a climate-anxiety fable wearing a love story's clothes. Its drowning Tokyo is unmistakably about a warming, weirding world -- and about the generation left holding the bill, kids expected to sacrifice their own happiness to restore an 'order' the adults broke. Shinkai keeps sharpening that blade until the film poses a genuinely thorny question: if saving the world means surrendering the person you love, is the world worth saving on those terms? What sets the movie apart from its glossy peers is its refusal to blink. This is a mainstream blockbuster that ultimately sides with selfish, human, insubordinate love over collective duty -- and, remarkably, declines to punish that choice or bury it under tidy redemption. It's a prayer for personal happiness in an age of doom, and it means every defiant word. You may not agree with where it lands; that discomfort is precisely the point, and it's what lingers long after the credits.

Strengths & Shortcomings

Let's be honest: this film lives in Your Name's enormous shadow, and it knows it. Shinkai runs a strikingly similar playbook -- star-crossed teens, a supernatural hook, RADWIMPS montages, weather as destiny -- and by the numbers it's the lesser, less tightly plotted machine. The middle sags a touch, a few emotional beats get muscled along by the soundtrack rather than fully earned, and Hodaka's impulsiveness will test viewers who bounce off him early. The plot's logic runs on pure feeling; poke it and seams show. And yet. What Weathering With You has that its predecessor doesn't is nerve. Your Name gave you the reset button and the perfect reunion; this one refuses the easy out and dares you to sit with the fallout. The animation is arguably even more astonishing, the emotional swings bigger, the ambition riskier. It's a flawed, overwhelming, deeply felt movie -- not the tidier masterpiece, but in some ways the braver one. Go in expecting a companion piece, not a sequel, and it soars.

FAQ