This is, to put it lightly, a busy set-up. Hodaka, who’s since found himself a crash pad with a disreputable but good-hearted writer named Keisuke (Shun Oguri), thinks they can monetize this ability, and the two set up a website and go into business summoning sunshine for around $30 a pop. When she prays, the rain briefly gives way to bright sunlight - a gift she acquired after a mysterious incident when she was keeping watch over her dying mother the year before. But she’s harboring a secret, one that she shows Hodaka up on the roof of an abandoned building. She’s a teenager herself, one who lives alone with her younger brother Nagi (Sakura Kiryu), and they need money. Later, to her annoyance, Hodaka attempts to “rescue” Hina from some men in the red light district. He meets Hina (Nana Mori) when she gives him a free burger at the fast-food restaurant where she works. He’s got some savings, but not much of a plan - too young to legally work, he crashes in a manga café and asks advice from internet forums. The film’s hero, Hodaka (Kotaro Daigo), is a 16-year-old runaway who’s fled to Tokyo from the isolated island on which he grew up. Maybe it’s more fair to call it one about young people contending with an awareness that their futures may have been sacrificed by the generations before them. To say that it’s an allegory about climate change feels both true and a little reductive. It brims with emotions and wears its watery heart on its sleeve, but it’s a decidedly minor-key, more melancholy affair than its predecessor its characters contend with homelessness, being orphaned, sex work, and gun violence. Like his monster 2016 hit, Shinkai’s latest is a teen love story shot through with touches of magical realism - in this instance, revolving around a young woman’s ability to temporarily cause the clouds to part and allow sunshine through. Weathering With You comes from writer/director Makoto Shinkai, whose body-swapping romance Your Name became a global phenomenon, the highest-grossing anime feature of all time. Unless, of course, you happen to find yourself with the power to change it, the way one of the characters in Weathering With You does - a miraculous talent that turns out to be accompanied by a terrible choice. The weather is the weather, and, regardless of how human behavior may have altered it, it has to be lived with. We used to have beautiful springs and summers,” one character muses. It’s the acceptance that a recent misery might just be the new normal. But even when the storm gets severe enough to start driving people from their homes, it’s spoken about with a resigned acceptance that feels terribly familiar. On the news, the unrelenting precipitation gets described first as unseasonable, then as record-breaking, and finally, when it gives way to typhoon warnings and bursts of snow in August, as dangerous. Rain sheets down on the waterlogged city with a dreary consistency, transforming its sidewalks into seas of puddles, and obscuring its citizens under slow-moving streams of umbrellas. The animated Tokyo of Weathering With You is caught in the grip of a seemingly endless downpour. Makoto Shinkai, the director of Your Name, is back with another magical realist anime love story.
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