16 year old Hodaka faces a tough life when he runs away from home for the hard streets of Tokyo. Luckily for him he runs into Hina, a pretty young woman who can pray for sunshine and the sun appears where ever she is - a wonderful (and lucrative) skill when the county has seen unprecedented amounts of rain with the downpour not letting up for months.

 

Equal parts emotional, thoughtful, funny and serious, Weathering with You is a beautiful -both the story and design - follow up (although completely unrelated in plot and characters) to the smash hit Your Name, and for me, the latest installment did not disappoint.

 

Throughout the film the audience was all in, all together - laughing, crying, and at times ‘what the heck-ing’ - as they followed the protagonists’ journey.

 

There are a few holes in the story, with a couple of unexplained parts that come up and then go nowhere - for example we never find out why the main character Hodaka ran away from home to start with - which was a bit frustrating in hindsight but the film pulls you in so well I didn’t think about it until after we left the cinema. My one critique my one critique (and the reason it’s not 5 stars) would be the ending (no spoilers I promise). I love WHAT happens but the execution really took away from the effectiveness of it. I think it would have had far more impact if it had have finished at the end of the climax with a quick wrap up with perhaps a short voice over. Instead it gave a ‘what happens after’ but it made an underwhelming (and kind of annoying) end to a fantastic movie.

 

If you're a fan of Your Name, you have to see Weathering with You!