MA in Literature. Criticism of otaku culture, literature, and the arts.
Editor’s note: Spoiler warning.
I had eagerly awaited the opening day of Weathering with You, but my immediate response after seeing it was disappointment. I suspect quite a few people shared that feeling when the lights came up at the end of the screening. The theater was packed, but unlike the Rascal Does Not Dream film I saw at the beginning of the month—or Your Name. back then—Weathering with You did not set off sobs from every direction. That, first and foremost, was the source of my disappointment. Makoto Shinkai had not moved me in a new way, as I had expected him to. Let me take my time explaining why.
Representations of Landscape
The story of Weathering with You, as its title suggests, is about the weather. Here, as in Shinkai’s previous work, the weather expresses the characters’ emotions. Through Hodaka’s monologues, the film repeatedly gives voice to this thought: the weather is people’s state of mind, their emotions. Praying for fine weather and open blue skies is therefore synonymous with praying for happiness and a cheerful state of mind. It is within a landscape of precisely this kind of “weather” that Hodaka, the male protagonist, makes his way to Tokyo. He pedals through wind and rain that stand for his gloomy mood, chasing a shaft of sunlight all the way to the edge of the outlying island. Rain clouds cover the entire sea, while the sunlight’s destination across the strait is Tokyo, where Hina, the female protagonist, lives. Hina does much the same: listening to the sorrowful sound of rain in her mother’s hospital room, she looks toward that shaft of light outside the window, climbs to the roof of an abandoned building, and prays for a bright future. Nor is there any surprise in the sequence where, after meeting, the two set up a platform for weather prayers. The 100% sunshine girl brings people happiness and joy along with clear skies. The music’s rhythm is cheerful here, and so is the audience’s mood.
Yet, familiar though this approach is in Shinkai’s work, I have to admit that the link between representations of weather and the characters’ states of mind is too simple, too clichéd. I suspect that many people share my preference: our favorite representations of landscape in Shinkai are probably still the school rooftop towering above the entire city and the angels’ stairway shooting into the clouds in the opening movies for the two ef games. By comparison, the landscapes in Weathering with You have only their exquisite surfaces; the richness of feeling is gone. As a viewer, I cannot feel the characters’ anguish and unease as I did through the flickering lens flare at twilight in Your Name. Of course, this is not to say that Weathering with You has no representations of landscape beyond the weather. But I have to say that the excessive emphasis on weather, and the overly simple binary of clear skies and rain, have greatly diminished the power of Shinkai’s lyrical use of landscape.
Stepping Outside Sekai-kei
In fact, I had already said in an earlier “thoughts” post that I would find it hard to give Weathering with You a positive assessment if it failed to reach new heights in its treatment of the abstract elements that sever the “you and I” relationship—or even retreated to the intermediary social layer. I was not setting out to make a prediction, but Weathering with You has unfortunately walked straight into that prediction’s line of fire. Put simply, it inherits all manner of elements from Your Name., but not its sekai-kei aesthetic.1
Beginning with Children Who Chase Lost Voices, Shinkai has gradually replaced the science-fiction premises of his earlier work with premises drawn from folklore. The same is true of Weathering with You: Hina, with her ability to clear the skies without fail, is cast as a “weather maiden,” a figure that has kept human civilization stable for centuries. The price of this power is to become a hitobashira, a human sacrifice. As the maiden uses her power, she will gradually become as transparent as rainwater, until she finally disappears into the world in the sky. A girl bearing the fate of humanity on her shoulders, and a choice between that girl and humanity’s fate: this would seem to be a classic sekai-kei structure. In fact, it is not. There are three reasons.
First: in confronting this choice, Hodaka does not display sekai-kei’s most important feature—powerlessness. In Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu, for instance, this oppositional structure is present, but the male protagonist, Asaba, cannot make any choice, nor does he have any real say in the choice. All he can do is watch helplessly as Iriya boards a fighter plane with no return ticket, immersed in his own sense of powerlessness. Or take Owaru Sekai no Album:2 all “I” can do is silently remember the name of the girl who is about to disappear, leaving tears on a parched beach. Or take the final chapter of AIR, Hiroki Azuma’s favorite sekai-kei work: the protagonist/player turns into a crow and is stripped of every choice, able only to watch helplessly before the screen as Misuzu moves toward her end, unable to do anything at all.
To put it in less than flattering terms, the powerlessness of sekai-kei is an aesthetic of taking pleasure in this sense of powerlessness, taking pleasure in a certain powerlessness of the male subject—or, as we might put it more obscenely, impotence. Your Name. cleverly strikes a balance between powerlessness and a happy ending through its protagonists’ body-swapping and the fusion of two narrative strands: saving the village and forgetting names. But in Weathering with You, faced with this choice, Hodaka chooses the girl without hesitation. There is no hesitation, no obstacle of any kind; simply longing for her is enough to bring fulfillment. This undoubtedly pales beside that precious final turn back in Your Name.
Second: as I said in that earlier post, the chief obstacle separating the two should be an abstract element. The weather maiden’s power seems to fit, but the problem is that it does not become the chief obstacle separating them. When we dwell less on the story’s premises and attend instead to how Shinkai actually depicts this separation and these obstacles, we discover that the real obstacle here is the police. And the police stand in their way not because of Hina’s abstract power, but because Hodaka has run away from home and possesses a gun, and because Hina has lied about her age.
Children Who Chase Lost Voices is undoubtedly a turning point for Shinkai. From that film onward, he has repeatedly declared his intention to pursue entertainment in animated film. The police chases in Weathering with You, like the battles between the organization and the underground people in Children Who Chase Lost Voices, seem to embody what Shinkai understands by “entertainment.” These beautifully animated cops-and-robbers chases, coupled with the sound editing at which Shinkai excels, do indeed have extraordinary force and expressive power, just as he says in interviews and in the novelization’s afterword. But that expressive power cannot conceal how clichéd this “entertainment” feels. After all, we do not go to the cinema to see Shinkai for action scenes like those in Detective Conan.
So when Shinkai places the police chase at the story’s climax, treating it as the solution to the crisis in the “you and I” relationship, premises such as the world’s secret and the maiden’s power become empty trappings. Escape the police, and the maiden’s curse is defeated too. The world’s secret is discarded before it has even begun to show itself. Looking back at Your Name., we find that saving the village does not provide an occasion for the two to meet; on the contrary, it becomes the reason they cannot recognize each other. Even the power to save hundreds of people cannot overcome forgetting. Thus, although Your Name. has its own “entertainment” in saving the village, its chief obstacles remain abstract elements such as time and forgetting.
Third: the fate of the world—or rather, the crisis threatening it—is not on a grand enough scale. Although three years of unceasing rain submerge the parts of central Tokyo toward Minato Ward, they cause no deaths or injuries. Nor has people’s everyday life come to a halt. At the end of the story, even the elderly woman who once prayed for clear skies says that the land Tokyo stands on used to be sea: now it has simply gone back to how Tokyo was a few hundred years ago, in the Edo period. Here, the fate of the world, the enormous disaster, becomes the everyday life that has accompanied humanity in the past and will accompany it in the future. Once the world crisis the girl bears on her shoulders is dissolved into everyday life, what meaning can the opposition between the world and the girl still have?
Monologue and Empathy
Of Shinkai’s animated films, the ones I rate most highly are Voices of a Distant Star and Your Name. It is in these two works that the method of “vertical montage”3 unique to Shinkai finds its fullest expression. Crucial to this is the way the male and female protagonists’ monologues overlap and separate. The voices of the monologues in Voices of a Distant Star travel faster than the fastest speed in this universe, the speed of light: they allow the voices of a boy and girl on planets tens of light-years apart to overlap in an instant. In Your Name., the voices of the monologues cross the dimension of time, coming together in a single sentence across a three-year gap on the timeline. But in Weathering with You, the female protagonist Hina’s monologues are absent. Apart from the dream that night at the hotel, almost all the film’s monologues belong to Hodaka, the male protagonist. The absence of the female protagonist’s monologues is undoubtedly the main reason Weathering with You has such difficulty eliciting empathy.
The first thing this absence makes me feel is a difference in temperature between the two protagonists as their romance develops. In Your Name., the monologues that transcend time and space and are heard over the same image let me feel the two falling in love with each other, step by step, at the same time. But without the female protagonist’s monologues, Weathering with You lets me feel only Hodaka’s one-sided ardor. I cannot feel the stirrings of Hina’s inner life. Viewers confined to the male protagonist’s monologues naturally cannot feel the kind of anxiety we feel when Mitsuha goes to Tokyo in search of Taki in Your Name. Nor can they gain a god’s-eye view from which to watch over the course of the protagonists’ romance. There is thus no basis for speaking of “anxiety about the contingency of romantic relationships,” an important theme in Your Name. and an aspect of sekai-kei’s problem of fate.
What I feel in Weathering with You, then, is closer to the Shinkai of the She and Her Cat era. I feel an overlap between Hodaka, who flees his hometown and comes to Tokyo, and Shinkai, who breaks away from his father’s construction company and seeks his own path at Falcom. The male protagonist’s monologue becomes that of the cat = Shinkai. The impression of the boy’s one-sided longing likewise becomes the cat’s one-sided love. And this is not the Shinkai I like.
The Meaning of “Alright”
Perhaps, then, Weathering with You was, from the outset, not a film that set out to surpass Your Name., but one that deliberately distanced itself from it. Or, as Shinkai put it in an interview, a film “full of willfulness.” Certainly, to see Hodaka choose Hina without hesitation when faced with a choice between the world and the girl—to see such a “fastball down the middle” in a film on this scale—does indeed give a sense of willfulness. But what puzzles me most is this: everyone says with one voice that the two need not feel guilty about the sudden change in the weather, that they need not take responsibility for the world’s transformation. Yet in the final scene, on seeing Hina offer a prayer facing the submerged city, Hodaka firmly rejects what everyone has said, declaring with absolute conviction—
That’s not true. The world wasn’t crazy from the start. We changed it. That summer, up on the dome of that sky, I made the choice. Hina mattered more than blue skies. Hina’s life mattered more than the happiness of so many people. And so we, too, prayed: whatever shape the world might take, we would simply go on living.4
Yet, at odds with that firm tone, inexplicable tears run down Hodaka’s cheeks. Hina asks, “Are you alright?” Hodaka gathers himself, recovers that firm tone, and delivers the most powerful line in the entire film, the ending that says the most—
「陽菜さん、僕たちは――」。 “Hina, we—”
「僕たちは、大丈夫だ」。 “We’re alright.”
I have not yet fully sorted out what I feel about this ending. But perhaps that is only natural: in the novelization’s afterword, Shinkai says that this ending remained unsettled during production. He had never managed to capture precisely what the two were feeling at that moment. What finally decided it for him was “We’ll Be Alright,” a song Yojiro had proposed at the outset but which had never found a suitable place. And so Shinkai said: “(What they’re feeling) is all already written here.”
The heart of the lyrics to “We’ll Be Alright” can be summed up in 「君の大丈夫になりたい」—“I want to become your ‘alright,’ rather than make you ‘alright.’”
So, as Hodaka watches Hina offer a prayer facing the submerged city in the final scene, the decision he makes—the decision he made up on the dome of the sky—is not to abandon the world and choose Hina. The real power to decide has always weighed on Hina’s shoulders. As he looks at Hina—no longer a weather maiden, yet still offering a prayer as she faces the submerged city—he resolves no longer to affirm his own choice, but to affirm Hina’s. What he does is precisely what the lyrics describe: in this submerged world, in this storm-lashed weather, he goes on living as Hina’s “alright,” goes on living as Hina’s “happiness.” This is not a story about choosing between the world and the girl. It is a story about the stance we take as we go on living. So it is at the end of the novelization: once such a stance has been chosen, the raindrops that submerged Tokyo can glide across their joined hands like a caress on the skin, turning from disaster into blessing.
One final point perhaps needs adding. Although the representations of everyday life after Tokyo’s submersion keep bringing to mind the question of everyday life after the earthquake disaster, I do not particularly want to put the two together. Read that way, Weathering with You would not even measure up to Hakubo, which depicts everyday life continuing after the earthquake disaster, with boys and girls still capable of innocent romance. Commenting on Twitter on the similarities between Weathering with You and Ponyo, Naoya Fujita described the latter as “a work about establishing the attitude one ought to take in a country continually facing disasters of every kind.”5 I think he is absolutely right to dissolve the singularity of 3.11—the earthquake disaster of March 11, 2011—by placing it within the broad category of “disaster.” As Weathering with You puts it, “whatever shape the world takes”—whether earthquakes, tsunamis, torrential rain, or ice and snow—we will go on living together with those who become our “happiness,” our “alright.”
Editor’s note: Most of the controversy over Weathering with You centers on whether this is a regression in the sekai-kei imagination or an expression of the imagination of the 2010s—perhaps here we can glimpse the animation industry’s development… or decline.