Weathering With You (2019) Review: A Gorgeous Storm That Almost Clears

🌧️ Introduction

🌠 This review is part of our Makoto Shinkai Movies Ranked guide – see how Your Name, Weathering With You, and Suzume stack up and where to start.

Following up a global phenomenon is the most thankless job in cinema. After Your Name became the highest-grossing anime film in history, Makoto Shinkai could have photocopied his own formula and printed money. Instead, Weathering With You (2019) keeps the ingredients — teenagers, impossible skies, a RADWIMPS score — and deliberately breaks the recipe, trading Your Name’s clockwork structure for a moodier, rain-drowned story that ends on a choice most blockbusters wouldn’t dare make. It grossed over 193 million dollars worldwide and became Japan’s official Oscar submission, so “difficult second album” is relative.

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Weathering With You (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

The rain-and-light animation is the star here — physical media preserves the detail streaming compression smears.

Let me set expectations honestly, dad to dad: this is an 8/10 — a film I genuinely love that lives one unavoidable comparison away from greatness. If Your Name is the once-a-decade masterpiece, Weathering With You is the gorgeous, slightly reckless younger sibling: not as disciplined, arguably braver, and carrying the single most beautiful animation of Shinkai’s career.

The Premise: A City Drowning, a Girl Who Sells Sunshine

Hodaka is sixteen, freshly run away from his island home, and discovering that Tokyo without money, contacts, or a plan is a very cold machine. It rains constantly — not movie rain, but a supernatural, months-long deluge that has become the city’s new normal. He scrapes by writing for a scrappy occult magazine until he meets Hina, an orphaned girl raising her little brother alone, who has a secret: when she prays, the sky clears. A small patch of blue, for a little while, wherever she is.

What follows is one of Shinkai’s smartest ideas: the two teens turn her gift into a small business. Need sunshine for your street market, your fireworks festival, your wedding? Hire the sunshine girl. This middle stretch of the film is pure joy — a montage economy of small miracles, each job showing what a sliver of blue sky does to human beings who have forgotten it. As a premise for the streaming-gig-economy era, “monetizing the weather” is almost too on the nose.

But folklore is never free, and the film is upfront about the price: a weather maiden is a sacrifice, not a service. The final act forces Hodaka into a choice between one person and, effectively, everyone — and the film’s answer is the boldest thing Shinkai has ever put on screen. I won’t spoil it. I’ll only say the ending divided audiences for a reason, and I respect the film enormously for refusing the safe version.

The quiet strength of the film is its view of adults. Suga — the shabby magazine editor who takes Hodaka in — and his niece Natsumi are Shinkai’s best supporting characters: compromised, kind in inconvenient ways, and a preview of who these kids might become. As a father, it’s Suga’s arc that sneaks up on you; he’s what happens when a man decides his grief is a settled matter, and the film gently proves him wrong.

The Animation: Rain as a Character

Here’s where I abandon all critical distance: Weathering With You is the most beautiful film Shinkai has made, and given what Your Name looks like, I don’t type that casually. All three of these films share that perfect Shinkai graphic style, but this one pushes it furthest. Rain is the hardest thing in animation — every droplet is a decision — and this film sets an entire feature in it. Puddle physics, drops chasing each other down windows, the specific gray-green light of a city that hasn’t seen sun in weeks. Then Hina prays, the clouds tear open, and columns of light hit wet asphalt with a warmth you can feel in your chest.

The film weaponizes contrast. Because 90 percent of the runtime is drenched, every sunbreak lands like a chemical event — the visual equivalent of the first warm day of spring. And the above-the-clouds sequence, where the film shows what actually lives up there in its sky-world mythology, is one of those showcase scenes I’d use to demo a new TV. Streaming compression genuinely hurts this movie; it’s a strong argument for the 4K disc.

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Weathering With You (Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

The standard edition — the drowned-Tokyo visuals still shine at 1080p.

The RADWIMPS Score, Round Two

RADWIMPS return, and the band’s second collaboration with Shinkai is moodier and more textural than Your Name’s hit parade — more score, fewer showstoppers, which fits the film’s overcast palette. When the big vocal tracks do arrive, they’re deployed with the same edit-fused precision: the sunshine-business montage and the climactic run are both cut to the music in a way that makes the songs feel like scenes rather than accompaniment.

Is it as iconic an album as Your Name’s? No — nothing is. But the soundtrack has become my default rainy-Sunday work album, which tells you the mood engineering works even without the pictures.

Family Watch Notes — A Notch Older Than Your Name

Our call: 12 and up. There’s nothing graphic here, but the film is tonally heavier than Your Name: the leads are runaway minors navigating an indifferent city, there’s a subplot involving a found handgun that gets genuinely tense, and the fringes of Tokyo nightlife brush the story (handled discreetly, but present). A thoughtful 12-year-old will be fine and probably riveted; for younger kids, start with Your Name or Suzume instead.

The flip side: this is a great film to watch with a teenager, precisely because its ending is an argument starter. What do you owe the world versus one person? Is the “responsible” choice always the right one? Our post-film debate ran longer than some films. That’s not a bug.

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Weathering With You (Novel) by Makoto Shinkai (opens in a new tab)

Shinkai's own novelization adds inner monologue and context the film deliberately leaves ambiguous — including the ending.

Where It Stumbles

Honesty time — the reasons this is an 8 and not a 10:

• The structure is looser than Your Name’s. That film was a Swiss watch; this one is a mood piece wearing a plot. The middle act, wonderful as it is, circles the same beats a couple of times before the folklore engine kicks in.
• The mythology stays vague. Shinkai gestures at the sky-world rules rather than defining them, and the climax asks the mythology to carry more weight than its worldbuilding strictly earned.
• The gun subplot divides. It creates real stakes in a film that didn’t entirely need them, and it pulls the tone toward a grittiness the story only half-commits to.

None of this sinks the film. But where Your Name’s seams only show if you hunt for them, this one’s are visible from your seat — you just stop caring every time the sky opens.

📺 Movie night sorted: thousands of films and shows are streaming on Prime Video — free for 30 days. Worth a look before you buy the disc.

📌 FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions

Is Weathering With You worth watching?

Yes — a clear 8/10. It is Makoto Shinkai’s most visually stunning film, and its bold ending gives it an identity of its own. Just do not expect it to hit the structural perfection of Your Name.

Do I need to watch Your Name before Weathering With You?

No, it is a fully standalone story — but watch Your Name first anyway. It is the better film, and Weathering With You contains cameo appearances that land as a delightful surprise if you know the earlier movie.

Is Weathering With You connected to Your Name?

They share a universe in a light-touch way: two characters from Your Name make brief cameo appearances. It is a bonus for fans, not a plot dependency — you will not be lost without it.

Is Weathering With You suitable for kids?

We say 12 and up. The leads are runaway teens navigating an indifferent adult city, there is a tense firearm subplot, and the themes are heavier than Your Name. Nothing graphic, but tonally it is a teen film.

How successful was Weathering With You?

Very. It grossed over 193 million dollars worldwide, topped 14 billion yen in Japan, and was selected as Japan’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards.