It was a balmy, overcast afternoon in Texas, the clouds were heavy with water on the precipice of falling to the ground below. I rushed to finish my lawn and garden chores, hopeful that the moisture would help my corn crop. After drying the sweat from my body and wringing the salty liquid from my sweaty clothes, I decided it was perfect weather to watch an anime summer hit that was sitting in my queue. I put Weathering With You on the back burner based solely on the director Makoto Shinkai’s sensational film Your Name. Despite all the acclaim and love Your Name received, I honestly felt like it was lacking everything I wanted from its premise. I won’t go into it very deeply other than to say I was extremely disappointed and was in no way moved by its story despite a friend of mine being moved to tears. I felt it dodged all the questions I wanted answers to in favor of being a completely different film that was ultimately banal. On the other hand, “Weathering With You” puts its best foot forward. It made an effort to combine its fantasy with its human element, which is clearly Shinkai’s aim in both films. Still, even with the perfect atmosphere to watch his latest endeavor, Shinkai’s tale of Sunshine Girls and young love mixes like oil and water.

The Japanese name of the film is Tenki No Ko, which translates to Weather Child, a title that is a bit more on the nose. Weathering With You is more of an english tongue-in-cheek title that brings together the two major themes of the film, namely the weather and the emotional growing pains of youth. The story revolves around a teenage runaway Hodaka who finds himself homeless in Tokyo. On his journey from home to homeless to employed, he runs into several colorful characters. The shady but fatherly middle man Keisuke, his assistant Natsumi, and ofcourse his first crush, a girl named Hina, and her precocious little brother Nagi. Hodoka’s new found employment essentially comes down to writing up human interest pieces for Keisuke to sell to various entertainment rags. Recently, the rain in Japan has been unending, a downpour daily, and without any sun in the forecast, Keisuke determines it would be good to sell people some kind of mystical hope in the old tale of the Sunshine Girl, a maiden tasked with praying for good weather. In researching this, Hodoka crosses paths with Hina, a girl who just so happens to have such a gift. Hina also happens to be the sole provider for herself and her brother after their mother suddenly passes away. In an effort to raise money, Hodoka and Hina turn to the internet, offering to goto a location to pray the rain away so people can enjoy the outdoors.

I will say I went out of my way to leave out many of the details that gather the characters together, mostly because the film seems to revel in little story surprises, like little splashes of cold water on a hot day. In fact, that might be the best thing about the film, it consistently surprises you with both the mundane and the fantastic. Just like Your Name, the story is more surreal than fantastic. Mostly, it’s a story about growing up but right in the heart of it is this power to control the weather, specifically to make people happy. The problem with the film is it can’t decide which is more important, how the weather affects people or if its a story about struggling to control your life. The two should work in tandem, but the story takes such a long time to find a place for these two gears to mesh. For example, while Hodoka is a runaway trying to live his life his way, we as a society deem him too young to make these choices for himself and we strive to rob him of this autonomy. On the other hand, we as humans are not in control of the weather, we live at the whims of gods and nature. That is until the Sunshine Girl appears. Suddenly, we have the power, we have the control. The weird thing is that these two themes never really come together. The story comes off a little like a jazz drumming. There is a beat, but both hands are moving in wildly different directions, often syncopated, only coming together at the end. It is a bit frustrating the longer you watch the film because you feel like they can’t decide which story you are watching, the story of young runaways or the story of human struggles against climate change. In effect, you are watching both happening concurrently on parallel tracks.

What is a central sticking point and its strongest feature is the consistent visual metaphor of water. This is the wettest animated film I have ever seen, wetter than Panyo and the Little Mermaid. The water is meant to be the glue that binds the fantastic and realistic elements of the story, but more often it is lubricant, reducing the friction between the two, making it almost impossible for them to truly meet. This in turn makes the water itself a third prong to the story, each line going off in its own direction. Water has a unique property in that it always finds the path of least resistance, and yet the film finds a way to completely remove this property. Water is the central adversary to the film’s characters and at the same time, they consistently move through the rising waters as if it’s not even around them. This may have to do with either how adaptive humans can be or how ignorant we can be despite all the evidence around us. Essentially the only joining theme of the story is how as humans we ignore consequences in favor of getting what we want, which to the film’s credit, does come to a head in a very serious head. Accepting the world as it is without making bargains seems to be the main point, which is frustrating considering how long it takes to get there and how disparate the elements of the story are throughout much of the film. I can’t tell if I think it’s clever or ignorant.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this film over the last week. It leaves a longing for youth but keeps intact the bitter aftertaste that comes along with it. I longed for a wet, hot summer’s walk through verdant grounds in the midst of cityscape. I reminisced about the lovelorn pain of my teens, wondering if I made all the right decisions. I thought about the planet, worrying about our future as humans realizing how little of the earth’s time I would actually bear witness to in the grand scheme of even human existence, not to mention beyond it. One of these things is not like the other, and yet they all found their place in Weathering With You. I don’t think all of these things meshed well, it could have used a bit of polish, a bit less resistance, but in the end, I was left pondering its meaning long after the credits rolled. A movie so wet still left me thirsty for more.