weathering with you your name garden of words

Rather than the last fifth turning into a catastrophic 'Makoto, buddy, what in fuck's name are you doing?' collection of misjudgments, convoluted plot twists, and unforced errors, it's something much closer to the entire second half. Frankly, I would have been very disappointed in Shinkai if wisdom and taste had prevailed in this matter).

It is much more interested in character animation than anything he's ever directed before it goes well beyond the magical realism of his last two films into full-on Shinto fantasy, presenting a purely magical, folkloric adventure about Japan's history of earthquakes and natural disasters (it is, explicitly, a film about the emotional and psychic repercussions of the Fukushima disaster in 2011 - one that ultimately decides to abandon the very coherent and difficult themes about that disaster it has been developing for most of its running time when it will become impossible to have those themes and also be a big weepy teen melodrama. To be sure, there are elements in the film that feel very new. The last of these feels to me a bit like Shinkai's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou moment: a director with an incredibly clear and consistent aesthetic makes the film that leans with fiery-eyed 'fuck you' aggression all the way into that aesthetic, doubling-down on all of the things that any critic has ever declared to be a problem with his work. That was 2013's The Garden of Words, it was 2016's Your Name., it was 2019's Weathering with You, and right on schedule, it's 2022's Suzume. Shinkai Makoto makes one kind of film, and he makes it better than anybody else in the history of the medium: teen love story major scenes take place against dramatic sunsets sunlight glimmers off of pools of water there's rain there are trains in its last fifth, the story transforms from a smooth execution of genre tropes to the absolute goddamn dumbest thing you have ever seen.

Weathering with you your name garden of words