<em>Weathering With You </em>Confronts a Quiet Climate Apocalypse

The film’s heroes are Hodaka (played by Kotaro Daigo) and Hina (Nana Mori), two plucky teens struggling to stay above water (metaphorically and literally) in Tokyo’s rat race. Hodaka has run away from home with dreams of writing and big-city life, but can barely earn a living wage. Hina, an orphan trying to support her younger brother, works at sketchy clubs frequented by unsavory older men. Since this is a Shinkai movie, she also has a magical power, one vaguely rooted in Japanese myth: If she tries hard enough, she can essentially pray the clouds away for a little while.

Hina and Hodaka turn that ability into a business, traveling around Tokyo to give people little patches of sunshine, and Shinkai’s usual brand of whimsical world building follows. Rather than explaining upfront how Hina’s powers operate in this eternally rainy Tokyo, Shinkai sprinkles information throughout the narrative before kicking off an aggressively weird third act. In between, there’s a little comedy, plenty of giddy flirtation between the two leads, and raunchier dialogue than one would get in a Miyazaki film. Though Weathering With You is technically science fiction, its style is vividly contemporary—not an archetypal fable, but rather a compelling yarn about young people trying to live and love in an often hostile world of grown-ups.

Shinkai, who wrote as well as directed, has a natural way with the awkward poetry of teenage dialogue—all stammers and half-considered compliments—which he demonstrated in Your Name. That talent makes the charmingly romantic middle section of Weathering With You its strongest. After a while, though, Hodaka and Hina’s weather-control start-up unsurprisingly spirals out of their control, and the supernatural qualities of the world Shinkai has created begin to assert themselves. The final half hour of Weathering With You revolves around physical transformations, alternate dimensions, a pair of bumbling policemen on the tail of a missing handgun, and the two main characters going on the lam.

After the far gentler energy of their meet-cute, this tonal shift might prove too much for some audiences, but it’s further evidence of Shinkai’s boldness as a storyteller. While I can’t spoil the ending, I have to offer my applause for its stubborn and somewhat bleak fairy-tale logic, which proudly ignores the selfless and heroic acts typical of such animated allegories. Instead, Weathering With You sticks to its guns all the way to the finale. It’s a story of Japan’s younger generation figuring out its future, and of a repudiation of the past that goes hand in hand with hope.

David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.