23/1/20 - Weathering With You - SPOILER FREE REVIEW

On Saturday 18th January I went to Westfield Shopping Centre in London in order to watch the new Makoto Shinkai film, Weathering With You with some friends. When we saw it, we were excited, particularly due to the success of its predecessor, Your Name.

But what did I think of Weathering With You?

In short, I adored a lot of aspects of the movie. The aesthetics were amazing - it is a quality I find myself constantly enamoured with. The animators did a fantastic job bringing this story to life, and the artists manage to draw vibrant city-scapes with such love and colour whilst not deterring from the colour palettes. It is so stylised and hyper-realistic all the same.

Then there's the aspect of the sublime and nature. The power of the weather is significant to the story, as demonstrated by its name. The influences that it can have on the world are shown beautifully whilst still providing a sense of fear, awe and vulnerability for the viewer. The beauty of the animation is something which draws me into all of the works I have seen by Shinkai. The style and quality of the animation is fantastic.

Another thing I loved was the music. Like its predecessor, Your Name, the music was provided by RADWIMPS - who, yet again, did a spectacular job. My personal favourite of their discography was easily Grand Escape, which featured vocals from Toko Miura. The songs are very apt and used in the story to reflect a change in the mood, or the passage of time. The pacing of each song, the tune, tempo and the usage of the composition are always well used during the film to demonstrate these shifts. However, a qualm I did have with some of the transitions was that they could be jarring. This may have been an issue that arose solely due to my watching the dub as opposed to the Japanese version with English Subtitles, but the sudden burst of song lyrics in Japanese did not take away from the overall experience.

Then there's the story in itself - which provided a broad insight and perspective into socio-polotical issues, particularly climate change. However, it is also, at its core, a love story, which looked at a concept not widely known, or at least, my friends and I seemed rather unfamiliar with it. The concept of rain and sunshine provided plenty of room for pathetic fallacy and symbolism, I really enjoyed the concept, imagery and execution. It was vert interesting and easy to watch.

I do not intend to talk much about the Easter Eggs that I noticed whilst watching this particular film. Instead, I hope to discuss them further in a follow-up post, should I get the opportunity to see the film again in the cinema, or once it is released on DVD. However, I wills say this: in short, fans of other works by Shinkai won't be disappointed in what you find.

Until then, I would like to say that I wholeheartedly enjoyed watching Weathering With You and I would recommend seeing it, if you haven't already!