TENKI NO KO

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA DramaTenki no Ko
MOVIE DramaKimi no Na wa.

REVIEWS

• 

  Wavieff

  100/100
  MY WEATHERING WITH JAPAN

  

  I first saw Weathering With You in Japan with no subtitles, barely a cursory knowledge of the language, and an empty stomach. But I still cried my eyes out.

  Being in Japan felt surreal, like I was swimming through the fog of a waking dream. Every time I went to sleep, I dreaded waking up in my room back in America, staring up at the small wobbling fan which looked closer and closer to falling with each spin, but my Japan trip was indeed real, it was no dream. Going to the bakery every morning with shuttered eyes and a drag in each step was as real as the blue sky settling into its place amongst the clouds. Each badly-enunciated Japanese phrase, each jumble of a word, each ignorance of a social cue causing a slap to my head from myself because I know the right words! Saying them, however, was an entirely different ordeal. It was with this stumbling clumsiness that I tripped into a showing of Weathering With You, directed by the legendary Makoto Shinkai.

  

  Makoto Shinkai is a man who needs no introduction. Famed director of Your Name, a blockbuster so worldwide it garnered Elon Musk’s endorsement, Shinkai has reigned supreme over the “boy meets girl” genre in the animated form, and has been ever since going solo with his first project, Voices Of A Distant Star. Voices Of A Distant Star is an interesting case, because he animated the entire film all by himself. Though it blows through its short runtime (a brisk twenty-five minutes), the fact that it was Shinkai’s and Shinkai’s alone raised a lot of eyebrows towards the fledgling creator, and its concept, an ever-so-melancholy boy meets girl story that would fit right at home within Barnes & Nobles’ YA section, also helped assist in its acknowledgement. A boy and a girl are separated, due to one’s recruitment in the military, and the other remaining earthbound. As the story goes on, the text messages between our couple take longer and longer to send, until finally…Nothing. They can’t be together due to some cruel twist of fate. A simple conceit, to be sure, but one that would pervade through all Shinkai’s works through the coming years. Apart from Children Who Chase Lost Voices (an unabashed Studio Ghibli homage teetering the line of staunch plagiarism), Shinkai has stuck to this basic thematic constraint and threaded it through each and every one of his projects to date. No doubt there was a formative experience in Shinkai’s years that caused him to take this to heart, and thus imparts this overwhelming melancholy throughout everything. So perhaps it’s not in the changing of the story we should look for, but in the way that it’s told, for there are many ways to tell the same story.

  The thing Shinkai is most well-known for, aside from his tried-and-true story formula, are his backgrounds, with these glossy, well-lit landscapes reflecting each ray of the sun and popping with color. His character animation, maybe not so much, but it’s the loving detail he packs into each and every background which throws you into the world Shinkai has created, soaking in the often rainy atmospheres and making you take in the air of the place. You can really get a sense of his love for the world’s beauty and how it correlates with the passage of time. For example, in Five Centimeters Per Second, his love of summer sunsets reflecting the protagonist’s fling, or the blistering chill of the winter winds as the protagonist runs to see his lover, waiting for him at the train station a few miles away. And in Weathering With You, he really turns the climate knob to eleven.

  Weathering With You follows a our downtrodden protagonist Hodaka meeting a peppy heroine Hina, who we find out is able to pull back the oppressive rain from Tokyo to make way for the sun. (Though people can change the weather in this film, the most unrealistic thing about it is the ease with which Hodaka finds a paid writing job.) Because of the central concept of Hina changing the weather, there are two distinct moods of the movie: raining and not. You’d think this would be very binary, as in, there would either be very gray skies or not-a-cloud-in-the-sky sun, but as I stated before, Shinkai is a master of climate. He takes the gray skies and jumbles them up, making them darkly intimidating in one scene, or with patches of blue in between lighter hues in another. Same with the sun; Maybe we do get the blue sky, but we also have hints of the rain coming back with the clouds in the background of the shot. It’s in the minuscule details that really shine, and this goes tit-for-tat, even in terms of the narrative.

  

  The story is between these main two for the most part, but towards the back half of the film, we explore characters that Shinkai really hasn’t delved into before - secondary characters; Characters that supplement the main character and his journey. To clarify, this isn’t a deftly calculated slap at Shinkai’s face he’s just…literally never had anyone else but his main couple. So color me surprised when Hodaka’s surrogate father and Hina’s surrogate mother give them talks about life, romance, and more. It was the riffraff of this found family dynamic in the movie that really gave Weathering With You more color than Shinkai’s other works, really painting this slice of Tokyo in a comfortable light. These characters feel like people, as they’re supposed to, with lives and personalities and worries that extend from beyond the scene. Shinkai even delves into the mom and dad’s dynamic with each other, how it was falling apart before Hodaka’s arrival, and how he (and Hina) changed their lives for the better. Weathering With You definitely takes a step or two back from Your Name’s fast pacing, but I feel like that’s for the better, because instead of a lightning-in-a-bottle plot, we’re given time to get to know these characters. It makes Weathering With You feel distinct amongst Shinkai’s catalogue, no doubt showing the master at work. He may be making the “same story” over and over again but, damn it, if it isn’t getting better and better with each iteration!

  I wanted to review Weathering With You again because I didn’t feel this same connection with his most recent work, Suzume. To reiterate, the backgrounds are as gorgeous as ever, but I found myself missing the melancholy that Shinkai sneaks into every page of his films. Suzume felt impersonal, as if he was finally forced by the general audience to “make something different” though that may not have been what he wanted to do, so Suzume tasted like something different, it tasted like…you guessed it, Imitation Ghibli. Again. The worst part is, Shinkai is capable of so much more, and we’ve seen this with his oeuvre, but _Suzume _felt like an obligation rather than a project, at least to me. I’ll be sure to bite into my strong feelings for it, or rather, against it, in a later review, but for now I wanted to at least remind myself on why I felt such a connection to him in the first place. I saw Tenki No Ko (Weathering With You) during my last night in Japan, on impulse with my friend Jack, who changed his mind from not seeing it to a sudden “let’s go” paired with a wave from his hand. I’ll never forget those three weeks in Japan, but even if I did, I’d never lose that night. The nights of Katana Zero blasting through my iPod earbuds, the clack of the tracks, the large open skies, the compact city blocks, the hustle & bustle, the great people, the smack of hot ramen against my chapped lips. Until I can make it back to that hallowed ground of mine, I’ll have these memories. But I swear to not dwell on these memories forever! I’ll get back there on day. I swear the half-finished udon I left at a dining room table because I was too full of the tonkatsu, I swear it on the rusted bike I rode around the ports of Ashiya, and I swear on the ‘gracias’ I said to the cashier at the Sanrio store instead of ‘arigato’.

  Thank you, Shinkai, for creating this piece of me I’ll never let go.

  
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• 

  Monaka

  95/100
  This is Shinkai at his most ambitious.

  Introduction

  It has been three years since the release of Makoto Shinkai's Kimi no Na wa., much to international success. It's probably less known, though, that an equally-felt pressure of backlash accompanied this success. The shadow of Kimi no Na wa. is unquestionably present in his latest project, both in its production and story. But to confine my review to be just a contrast-and-comparison to its predecessor would be disingenuous, for Tenki no Ko is, without a doubt, an incredible film with qualities unique to it and, as such, it ought to be praised for its presentation and critiqued for its flaws. Nevertheless, a back-and-forth will be established between Tenki no Ko and Shinkai's previous works, especially Kimi no Na wa.. Presence of spoilers will be minimized and, if necessary, be approached through allusions; I really don't wanna spoil the experience for you.

  Plot, Characters, Worldbuilding

  Let's start with a short summary:

  Hodaka Morishima is a runaway teenager who moves to Tokyo for better prospects and experience freedom. Quickly going broke, he looks for Keisuke Suga, a sketchy-looking guy he met en route to Tokyo. He hires Hodaka as an assistant, collating weird stories and urban legends for an occult magazine. One of Hodaka's many assignments is to search for "the girl who brings sunshine everywhere she goes." Her name's Hina Amano, the same girl who he didn't yet know he had already met. Along with her younger brother and his fellow co-worker Natsumi, Hina and Hodaka uses this power to control the weather for the benefit of the people of Tokyo deprived of the blue sky.

  Sounds pretty simple, right? For those familiar with Shinkai, it will be noticed that Tenki no Ko leans more on the story side of things rather than the characters, which is a kind of misnomer since the characters are the plot, in a slice-of-life sense, yet the film clearly emphasizes the impact and consequences of their actions to themselves, to others, and to the world. Although the Shinkai-defining emphatic-visual storytelling is there, it never lingers more than what is enough for conveying the setting's atmosphere.

  It is through Hodaka that we see the film. He opens the film with his monologue, monologues which will recur throughout, and it is his struggles that frame the story, and drive the development of the other characters, particularly Hina and Keisuke. It is still surprising for me to see an ample amount of screentime be devoted to Keisuke, who is the kind of character I expect to be delegated to being a static side character. His circumstances are explored during these, how he came to be who he is now and how he reacts to the events surrounding him. He's an overall interesting guy, and I'd like it even more if the execution of his character's more polished, rather than shown in short bursts throughout.

  Hina, meanwhile, is more of a plot device rather than a developing character herself. One can argue that this can't be helped; unlike Mitsuha in Kimi no Na wa., we don't see the world through her perspective, which means that everything we know about her comes from what she tells Hodaka (and, subsequently, us the audience) and Hodaka's reactions to her and her actions. The first half of the film keeps the effort to cloak her in mystery. How did she get her power? What led to her and her younger brother's situation? I particularly accuse Shinkai here of never actually developing her as a character, and that Hodaka's only there to give her that one push towards a decision that is the closest she gets to a "development". All in all, it's a kind of a letdown that the same treatment Keisuke got isn't applied to her.

  As the ground of the answer to one of the questions that shape the enigma that is Hina Amano, the film presents us with an exposition of mythology. The world of Tenki no Ko is a crazy one, full of chosen ones, manifestations of magic, buried histories, and the elephant in the room that is the bizarre and abnormal weather of Tokyo. Many characters corroborate that the downpour the city's been experiencing has been going on for a long time. One character laments that their children has had the misfortune of growing up in these conditions, of not experiencing the radiant sunlight the same way they did during their own childhood. This is a statement of a general sentiment, shared by all characters present, of a longing to return to what is familiar and accepted as traditional, a treatment of which is somewhat novel.

  Another, equally significant side of the world of Tenki no Ko is its society. Both mythology and society envelop the characters, interweaving in its ebb and flow, dishing out the consequences of their choices. I dare say here that they're two sides of the same coin in the film. Hina and Hodaka share a concern that is central to their development, that of seeking their own place in their society, each in their own ways. In their pursuit of this, they find themselves faced with the decision of either integrating themselves to it or breaking away from it — it is here that Shinkai departs from his usual treatment of the familiar tropes of love and separation, and approach a new trope that's already been implicit in his previous works: individuality.

  Counterpoints

  I'm pretty sure you've noticed that, in a sense, all of Tenki no Ko is an echo of Kimi no Na wa. You could even go as far as saying that all of Tenki no Ko is just a rehash of Kimi no Na wa. That would be an overblown exaggeration though, as you'll see that Shinkai here is doing something different to his familiar theme of love, that he'll take a somewhat subtle swerve midway, with a surprising continuity with his previous works. I could even argue that it is here that Shinkai is at his most ambitious.

  As it is in most anime, love is a central motif in Shinkai's works; this is most prominent in Byousoku 5 Centimeter, Kotonoha no Niwa, and (especially) Kimi no Na wa. Heck, one of them need not even be a person for there to be love, like in Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko. Generally defined, love is a bond between two people, instatiated by a feeling of liking or caring for a person, and more specifically as romantic love, which is characterized by sexual attraction. We may now use the single word to express the many-varied kinds of love, but the Greeks had different words to refer to the variety of senses the word "love" now contains, and chiefly among them (and pertinent to the film) are eros (passionate love, and the closest to modern romantic love), philia (friendship), philautia (self-love), storge (familial love), and agape (charity). The development of Keisuke, Hina, and Hodaka are all marked by philautia, intertwined with the other kinds of love. As they continue to know each other, they also reveal to themselves, explicitly or not, the lack of philautia that contribute to their flaws and, in turn, lead them to overcome it. Tenki no Ko differs from Shinkai's previous works in the eventual emphasis the film places in philautia, an emphasis already implicit in Kotonoha no Niwa and Byousoku 5 Centimeter.

  Another is the propensity to violence (I am here working on a general description of violence as violence to the other), which is more present in Shinkai's more plot-driven works. Notable examples would be bullying (in Kotonoha no Niwa) and a deliberate bombing that teeters on terrorism, were it not for the overall context (in Kimi no Na wa.). In Tenki no Ko, this would be the presence of guns, a rarity given the strict gun laws in Japan, and the underbelly of Tokyo, as embodied by that one piece-of-shit jerk (you really can't mistake him). Guns are present in the two critical moments of the film, which most probably symbolize the unwanted intrusion of Hodaka (and his eventual self-assertion) into the society of Tokyo.

  In the topic of society, I mentioned earlier the nature of myth and society as a two-sided matter, both of equal importance to the characters and the plot. They are complementary to one another, yet they signify the opposing tendencies that the characters may take in their development. As is already said, the society represents the familiar and what is followed in tradition — in a word, permanence. Meanwhile, the forgotten history of myth tells a story of flux, of uncertainty in what is natural state of things, and of the inevitability of change. There is a remarkable analogy between the microcosm that is the world and society of our characters and the macrocosm that is the earth and sediments of mythology they're acting on, which can be then extended through a passing remark on the vastness of the sky compared to the calmness of the sea. It is these connections that I admire most in Tenki no Ko.

  Concluding Remarks

  There's nothing much I can say on the technical production of Tenki no Ko. The music are almost outstanding, they convey the atmosphere the scenes they made for. The insert songs are absolute stand-outs here, which does more than enough to give the scenes they're in the force they need. The music made many scenes memorable to me, particularly the climax. The visuals are nothing short of stunning. I can certainly say that Shinkai out-Shinkai'd himself here! There are many many beautiful shots and moments of elaborate cinematography that actually made me gasp. Kimi no Na wa. is nothing compared to what is shown here; I'm the source on that.

  Overall, Tenki no Ko is a film of overcoming obstacles, whether it be external or hidden in oneself. The director once said in an interview that the success of his previous production revealed to him what he wanted to do here, and that is to make a film that is more open to criticism. Tenki no Ko, then, is also a film about openness, of being open to what oneself is, to change and come what may, and to the new things that they didn't know they can do.

  When it opens in your country, go watch it. The experience is worth it.

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• 

  inAtus

  75/100
  It's a Shinkai movie. And that's not a good thing.

  __[ SPOILERS AHEAD. ]__

  With Your Name, Makoto Shinkai proved that anime films are getting better, proving worthy of the attention of the masses and the film industry worldwide. This was a huge accomplishment, yet it brings with it a dreadful promise: with all eyes looking, how is he supposed to follow up a critically-acclaimed film praised for its stunning visuals, gripping story, and unforgettable soundtrack?

  Weathering with You seems to be a direct answer to that, attempting to create a film that could potentially surpass its predecessor and further generate success for Shinkai. For anyone that has previous exposure to his work, however, I tell you: keep your hopes down. This is a Shinkai film, after all.

  First, let's give credit where credit's due: the animation is fantastic. CoMix Wave Films have kept their identity consistent: the blend of natural colors and attention to detail create a world that feels disturbingly realistic, yet gives an atmosphere that one could describe as 'offsetting'. From the abandoned buildings to the reflections in the water, it's a visual treat for those willing to give it the due attention.

  The story is set in the Your Name universe (which we eventually find out after Mitsuha and Taki's cameos), which helps establish that this world isn't normal at all. The supernatural aspect this time seems to be in the weather, and if the constant rain throughout the movie wasn't obvious enough, Shinkai explores themes of maturity, separation, and emotions we all feel when we face the new and unknown. Our main character, Horishima, is a teenager through and through, encompassing all of its best (and worst) traits. The movie never says as to why he goes into Tokyo, which could have given us an insight as to what kind of person he is, but it wouldn't have made a difference, anyway.

  Our main character's love interest, Hina, is given the same fate as Mitsuha, being held against her will to the supernatural forces that oversee their world. We are given reason to root for her, as she is genuinely doing her best to be good: she takes up part-time jobs to help her little brother Nagi, she uses her newfound powers to bring good to the world, and she's willing to accept the fate she has been dealt with. Ironically, even though she's younger than Morishima, she shows a surprising level of maturity and calmness.

  Together, they sort of cancel out each other's bad traits: Morishima helps Hina have a bit of fun with her youth, while Hina keeps Morishima from doing anything rash or stupid. Of course, the whole story doesn't revolve around them. Other characters, like Keisuke and Natsumi, merely serve as guiding characters that help progress the story forward, but their presence is still impactful when needed. And Nagi... he's actually just there to be cute. I mean come on, teru-teru Nagi is adorable.

  We knew that RADWIMPS was coming back to get involved with the soundtrack of the movie, but their presence here is a bit more subdued. Their music contribution still works in favor of the movie, setting the tone for the appropriate scene and amplifying the intensity of emotions on-screen.

  The ending of the movie has left many divided as to how they're supposed to feel towards these characters. Some might argue that Morishima might be the biggest simp in anime history for leaving Tokyo to become a flooded mess and disregarding the wellbeing of everyone in the city. Some might argue that the actions of Morishima are brilliant in breaking the trope that favors the common good, showing us that Morishima's a teenager through and through, and it would be unfair that he would suffer for millions to be happy. Either way, I find it interesting how it leaves most divided (people are leaning towards the negative side, though). I unironically thought it was a message of climate change and impending apocalypse, but that's just me.

  So did it succeed in setting out what it wanted to become? In my opinion, I knew it was nowhere near reaching it the moment I learned about the plot. And Shinkai fans know what I'm talking about: if you've been watching most of his works, a general storyline is usually followed: it's a love story, yet forces unknown to them keep them away. Whether it's something as simple as distance or social norms, to something as unusual as time travel or space, Shinkai is obsessed in the concept of how far love can drive a person.

  But the formula's getting old. After many months, I've grown less rash in evaluating the story after getting a new perspective on it, and it doesn't change the fact that most people will find it good, but consider me the handful of people that find it disappointing simply because it doesn't measure up to works such as The Garden of Words or Five Centimeters Per Second.

  It's a movie that has little to no flaws, but remember: it's a Shinkai movie. And that's not a good thing.

  Note: This review has been completely revised after the writer's dissatisfaction of its previous iteration. It does not change the writer's opinion, however.

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