Weathering With You

A teenage boy (Kotaro Daigo) runs away to Tokyo and meets a girl who can control the weather (Nana Mori), but soon finds that Cloudbusting is best left to Kate Bush songs or Paul McCartney concerts.

Makoto Shinkai’s follow-up to Your Name (the highest-grossing anime and Japanese film of all time) is another cosmic cornucopia of natural disaster and human connection, topical in theme and tropical in animation. Tokyo has never looked so good as the glistening visual depth on display, each individual raindrop so lifelike it’s a tiny heartbreak every time they land.

Weathering With You explores the relationship between people and the climate, the way the weather affects us and vice versa. Its story of a child sacrificing herself so the city folk can have sunshine feels Greta than the movie’s slushy romance, though it’s all at the service of the multidimensional, metaphysical magic the genre does so well (see also the charming cat and Ghibli-style borderline food porn).

This is a global-heart-warming urban fantasy about the impact of climate change on children and the effects of our actions rippling like puddles, both meteor and more windsome than Disney’s wildest dreams.

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