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Weathering With You comes from the same director as 2016’s Your Name, Makoto Shinkai, and shows the ideal of finding true love in a girl who knows how to stop the rain and give you clear skies forever.
The ‘Sunshine girl’ in question is Hina (above), who we first see visiting someone in hospital while it buckets down with rain outside, but amongst all that, a beam of light shoots down into a section of Tokyo, and down to a find a roof-top terrace. Hina heads up there, crosses a shrine gate, prays and the rain goes back into the clouds!
Meanwhile, a young lad, Hodaka, has escaped to live in Tokyo, but finds it’s expensive and he’s too young to get a full-time job. While down on his luck, he chances upon a gun, hidden in a waste bin, which will come into the picture later, but then has a chance meeting with a man, Keisuke Suga, who gives him a job writing clickbait articles for various magazines, and the first suggestion is “The girl who brings sunshine wherever she goes”, so we’re back to Hina.
Everyone wants some sun in a constantly rainy Tokyo, and she’s certainly good at what she does, but you find you can’t make rain rise without getting noticed… So, how long can she keep messing around with the weather like this?
Along the way, we learn Suga has a daughter he hasn’t seen in a long time, and as Hodaka develops an attraction to Hina, it gets a a bit weird when Hodaka keeps overreacting with his nervousness. I’d love to tell him to chill out for a bit, but seems to be a regular thing any time I’ve watched any anime.
In the second half, things rather go off at a tangent, of which I couldn’t really get a handle.
However, while Weathering With You looks amazing, as a whole, in my view, it doesn’t hold a candle to the superb Your Name.
Note also that the film can be watched in both the original Japanese language and the English dubbing. While I’ll go for the original language for a regular drama, I’m fine with the English dubbing for animation.
There’s a great amount of extras which will satisfy any fans:
- Interview with director Makoto Shinkai (11:14): Makoto Shinkai talks about how he got started in films with a short 20-minute movie, and then building from there. Plus, they go into the rain animation which was great, and he also mentions how Your Name‘s Mitsuha and Taki are both in this film, even though they’re not named, and how the timeline is such that they haven’t yet met each other in that 2016 film; and Makoto states he hasn’t yet decided if Hodaka and Hina will appear in a future film of his.
- Exploring Makoto Shinkai’s filmography (9:19): Clips of seven of his films.
- “Weather Front” featurette (24:08): The female star of the Japanese original dialogue, Nana Mori – who plays Hina, is given a camera to film meeting the fans for a Q&A, plus interviewing the director and also the film’s music score composers, Radwimps, who created 5 songs for the film plus 26 pieces of background music.
- Talk Show: Makoto Shinkai and Yumiko Udo (1:10:02): Well over an hour long, this is an in-depth feature from News Zero presenter Yumiko Udo, who interviews director Makoto Shinkai and his team.
- Trailers and TV Spots (10:35): A selection of 9 teasers, TV spots and trailers, in both English and Japanaese.
The menu features clips from the film, there are subtitles in English, Spanish and French, and the disc has 16 chapters. You can see images of the disc and box below with a reversible sleeve!
Weathering With You is out now on Blu-ray, Amazon Video and DVD. Also available is a Limited Edition Steelbook.
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FILM PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS |
4.5 10 8 5 |
| OVERALL | 7 |
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 112 minutes
Year: 2019
Distributor: Anime Ltd
Released: September 28th 2020
Chapters: 16
Cat.no: ANI0557
Sound: DTS 5.1 HD Master Audio, DTS 5.1
Languages: English, Japanese
Subtitles: Engish, English SDH, Spanish, French
Lyrics: English
Widescreen: 1.78:1 (Digital (1080p))
Disc Format: BD50
Director: Makoto Shinkai
Producers: Kôichirô Itô, Noritaka Kawaguchi, Genki Kawamura, Wakana Okamura, Stephanie Sheh, Michael Sinterniklaas
Screenplay: Makoto Shinkai
Music: Radwimps
Voice Cast:
Morishima Hodaka: Kotaro Daigo
Amano Hina: Nana Mori
Keisuke Suga: Shun Oguri
Natsumi Suga: Tsubasa Honda
Hodaka Morishima (UK): Brandon Engman
Hina Amano (UK): Ashley Boettcher
Keisuke Suga (UK): Lee Pace
Natsumi Suga (UK): Alison Brie
Takai (UK): Riz Ahmed
Moka Suga (UK): Lexie Foley
Fumi Tachibana (UK): Barbara Goodson
Yasui: Sei Hiraizumi
Takai: Yûki Kaji
Priest: Dino Andrade
Araki: Kentaro Araki
Tomi Tachibana: Chieko Baishô
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.