Shinkai Makoto has spent the last 20-odd years establishing a reputation as one of Japanese animation’s finest directors, through a combination of strong characters, thoughtful scripting, and a visually arresting blend of limited hand-drawn animation and beautiful computer-generated vistas. He first gained notice through independent shorts like She and Her Cat (1999) and Voices of a Distant Star (2002), before graduating to features and then super-stardom with his immensely successful body-swapping romance Your Name in 2016.

Weathering with You was his 2019 follow-up to that work, and as such fought not just against the crowded anime marketplace but also audience expectations. If it fails to match Your Name in quality, that failure is marginal. It is still a hugely accomplished film.

In a near-future Tokyo, runaway teenager Morishima Hodaka (Daigo Korato in Japanese and Brandon Engman in English) struggles to find a place to live and a source of income. Help with the latter comes from working for a local paranormal magazine and that leads him to Amano Hina (Mori Nana and Ashley Boettcher), who appears to have the power to change the weather.

Of course what is presented as a fantasy romance is, of course, a fictionalised treatise on Japan’s relationship to global climate change. Just as Your Name‘s second half based itself around a particular apocalypse, so Weathering With You explores the catastrophic effect of rising sea levels and constant torrential rain on Tokyo and its people. Shinkai visualises the transformation of the city in an impactful and emotionally effective fashion. The film can be sad, but it also strikes a resolute note. There is a sense of adaptation to the city when it becomes clear that transformation would mean too little too late. There is also something telling in how, upon meeting a woman with the power to stop the rain and magically compel the sun to emerge, Hodaka’s first impulse is to make a small business out of it.

For a film with so much rain falling, it is not a surprise that the water is beautifully animated. It is these CGI-enhanced touches, judiciously used by the animators, that allow Shinkai’s films to visually pop off the screen.  It is pleasing that he has developed such a distinctive and recognisable style, so well defined that one can pretty much recognise one of his films just from viewing a few minutes of footage.

Shinkai Makoto has become one of the must-see talents of contemporary anime, and his works have proved incredibly popular. His most recent film Suzume (2022) is, at the time of writing, the fifth highest grossing feature ever in Japan. Your Name remains in fourth place. Weathering With You, which is highly impressive but simply not quite as accomplished, has to make do being twelfth. It is a marvellous and timely work.