I refuse to grow up

Having seen Weathering With You 3 times as of today, I think I’ve been able to properly gather my thoughts enough to write something about it. That, or I’ve become so entrenched in my opinions that they’ve become blind faiths... you, dear reader, can decide.

First, a quick review: overall an extremely pleasant viewing experience. The visuals are your standard ComixWave flair; photorealistic backgrounds and great character animation. A standout was the stylization of water as little fishes, which I found super pretty (a good thing considering it’s raining for 80 percent of the films runtime). In the audio department, there’s a lot of great use of leitmotifs in the instrumentals that are really fun to mentally point out. In terms of vocal tracks, RADWIMPS returned with some awesome, memorable OST work; Grand Escape (featuring the cool, youthful voice of Toko Miura) is my favorite, with an echoing crowd-singing chorus that plays right at the climax of the film. That scene alone is worth the ticket price, as the effect when it’s played on surround sound can’t be reproduced outside the theatre.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. It’s a Shinkai film; it’s no surprise that the production quality is top-notch. The thing that gives me pause when I think to recommend this to others, however, is the story.

It’s a bog-standard “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets her back” kind of plot. That, in combination with teen romance, to many people can sound like a cheap recipe for a summer flick; and those rarely end up as being more than a cheap, fatty dish.

Being a sucker for that kind of cheap dish, however, I initially found it difficult to tell whether I liked it because of that junk food content, or if there was something richer that kept me coming back. After a lot of thought there is one thing I can say for sure:

Weathering With You is a story about refusing to grow up.

It’s a story that pits a diverse cast of interesting characters both young and old against each other; but what’s interesting is that they aren’t cleanly divided by age into naïveté and cynicism. Each are at wildly different points on that spectrum as a result of their personality and experiences. Some are right where you expect them to be, like the bright-eyes runaway country kid and the jaded, hard boiled detective. But others, like the struggling orphan taking care of her little brother, or the widower trying to regain custody of his daughter, show that cynicism is a choice; not an inevitability.

As the gears of my school year begin to screech to a start, I’m meeting all sorts of classmates. One conversation stands out, and not only because we were talking about Shinkai films: I remember him half-joking that he didn’t like to go see them because they gave you “rose-colored glasses”.

That’s stuck with me for a while. As someone who's in a career where your rose-colored glasses have to be on tight for you to move forward (Bakuman likens artists to gamblers, for example), I’ve been thinking a lot about the negative connotations attached to naïveté. And in doing so, I’ve come to a personal conclusion that I’ve been struggling to put into words for a while:

I prefer the blinders.

As someone who spent quite a bit of his youth wallowing in pessimism and cynicism and came out of it with regret, it’s one of my core tenets to be stubbornly naive. Life’s too short for any sort of self-doubt, shame, of cynicism. While there’s a healthy level of reality you should ground yourself in, it’s my opinion that people put themselves too deep in the concrete for fear of going completely unhinged.

That’s why my connection with this film is a very personal one, and one that I’m not sure will apply so strongly to other people. For me, it’s an anthem, a metaphor for the way I strive to live my life. At the lowest point in the film, when our main character has lost everything, he continues to strive relentlessly towards his goal of reuniting with his girl, not giving an inch of thought to the adults, authorities, and even forces of nature standing in his way. The childlike, but conviction-filled actions of Hodoka continue to draw me to the theatre even as I sit here writing this review.

Oh, and it helps that the girl is super cute. But that’s a discussion for a different forum. Either way, please go and support this film when it makes its way across the seas for an English release!