Weathering With You SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Review

Anime fans as you'll no doubt recall I was very late to the game when it came to checking out Your Name and so when Makoto Shinkai announced a new film you can bet i was going to watch it as soon as it was subtitled. So you can bet that I was going to be seeing this film the very first chance that I got and well today is that day and so here it is anime fans my review of the new Makoto Shinkai film Weathering With You.

The plot of the film is there's been alot of rain in Tokyo recently more so then usual and teenage runaway Hodaka Morishima befriends a young girl called Hina Amano who may or may not have something to do with it. This story is so freaking perfect I can't really find any fault with it and believe me i've tried to find some faults but I just can't it's so creative and so well told any praise it does get for it's story it deserves in my opinion.

Starring in the film is Kotarō Daigo as Hodaka Morishima , Nana Mori as Hina Amano , Chieko Baisho as Tomi , Sakura Kiryu as Nagisa Amano , Sei Hiraizumi as Yasui , Shun Oguri as Keisuke Suga , Tsubasa Honda as Natsumi , Yuuki Kaji as Takai , Aoi Yūki as Sayaka Natori , Ayane Sakura as Ayane , Hidekatsu Shibata as God , Kana Hanazawa as Kana , Kana Ichinose as Sasaki , Kanon Tani as Yotsuha Miyamizu and I kid you all not the original Japanese voice actress for Goku Masako Nozawa as Fortune Teller.

I'll admit that I had no idea what to expect from the acting in this film because I didn't see any of the previous and i've not heard any of the cast in anything apart from this film. So I was presently surprised when the acting was not only as good as the dub actors for Your Name but better both of the I guess lead actors did a really good job and from what I can work out this is there first time voice acting and there both able to do something which I think is very hard to do when voice acting and that's but across sadness and i'll explain why that's important later.

As with Your Name the animation for this film was done by CoMix Wave Films and I just have to say bra and vo to this company because they had a tough job following up the monster hit that was Your Name. In my opinion the animation in this film while clearly not as good as the animation in Your Name it's still better then most animation seen in most animated movies the film is at times breathtaking to look at from an animation stand point but that's the kind of thing you expect from a Shinkai film at this point.

What you don't expect from him tho is for him to mix his traditional style of animation with computer animation. Now I will grant people this he doesn't use computer animation that much infact he really only uses it to move the camera but when he does use it you really do notice it because it's not as good as the animation seen in the rest of the film but given that I think this is his time using it that's to be expecting and hopefully he'll get better with computer animation over time.

SPOILERS START HERE YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Now given that one of the main characters of the film is a runaway it really won't surprise you what happens in the film because he does get caught by the police. Which is something that I have an issue with not the fact that they caught a main character but how there portrayed in the film. The film portrays them as the villains of the piece which there not they are just normal guys and girls trying to do there job and like it or not Hodaka broke the law.

Let's take a second to talk about the main characters Hina our main girl for the film is struggling to get by looking after her younger brother since her mother died sometime prior to the events of the film starting. I'm going to honest here she is perhaps the most underdeveloped of the two main characters because we get to find out nothing about her and she doesn't really grow as a character which is a shame because she plays a huge part in the overall plot.

Onto our main male character Hodaka my main issue with him as a character is that we don't get to find out why he wanted to runaway in the first place which is a shame because it could have made for some great scenes. However he does kind of grow as a character over the course of the film even to the point where he just excepts going back to his hometown to finish school and he goes from being a metaphorical lost person to being found again this time with a new home and I guess a new family.

I would talk about the development of the other characters but they don't really get any and are mostly there to add in some comedy when needed. That's not to say that they don't get some dramatic scenes because they do but the comedic scenes featuring one or more of the side characters outweigh the dramatic ones in my opinion and given that this film has alot of drama especially in the third act i'm actually ok with that since it does make sense to lighten the mood every now and then.

Now given by the above picture you'd be forgiven for thinking that Hina is a high school student and for the most part in the film she does say she's eighteen.However this is wear things start to get creepy because it's revealed that she's not eighteen but is infact in middle school and to make things worse the third time we see her we see a few clearly older men hitting on her as does Hodaka who even at one point trys to tell her that he loves her.

I get that age is just number and all of that but still she's old enough to be his sister that's very creepy heck I was expecting the Dateline guy to appear and ask him to take a seat. Oh it get's worse tho because Hodaka who don't forget is a high schooler shares a bed with Hina who is in middle school granted Hina's younger brother is also in the bed but it's still creepy as hell and I have to wonder what was Shinkai smoking when he thought up those scenes like seriously what was he on I want to know.

I have to admit there was one part of the film which did really shock so OK we find out that due to Hina being able to basically control the sun everytime she uses her powers she is slowly turning into water and thus could die. That to me was such a great twist and it was something that honestly caught me of guard but at the same time I would have liked it if there was some hints to her becoming water like maybe you see get a slightly more happy expression on her face because she says that she wants to die so it would make sense or maybe you see her learning that she could die anything like that would have worked really.

As with Your Name this is a romance film and I personally feel that the romance aspect was done better here then in Your Name. Mostly because here you actually get to see the characters bonding and becoming friends and then love interests where as in Your Name we didn't get any of that heck the two main characters of that people didn't even spend that much time together on screen and so here because we could see there bond growing I could buy their relationship a little bit more.

SPOILERS END HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Overall in my opinion this film is going to be huge when it comes out stateside it might not reach the levels of Your Name but due to that film I wouldn't be surprised if alot of people went to see this one. That being said while I do like Your Name alot and I respect it for making anime more mainstream I personally prefer this film and so Weathering With You gets a 9.5 out of 10 from me.