Les Enfants du temps

As always, I commend the animation, it's really beautiful. The idea of incorporating the songs was also interesting, it sounded like an opening/ending for the beginning/end of the main character's life stages. The characters and their personalities were ok. So far so good, fine, not mediocre. But the script. Dear Lord, the script! Mr. Shinkai, please find someone else to write the scripts and stick to animating and directing, because you're just not very good at those scripts. Maybe the book is better, more coherent, makes more sense, but this was really bad. Weirdly disjointed, for a long time you're actually groping for what it's exactly about, and by the time it becomes somewhat clear, another theme has gotten mixed up in it. If it had been two different films, it would have been better. And then there was the ending! God, that ending! I haven't seen anything so stupid in a long time. [SPOILER] Three years of constant rain? And everyone's fine with it, especially things, their apartments that don't succumb to mold, corrosion, disrepair, the global order going under? Sure, after three years of rain, it would definitely be this sunny. Whoopee. [END SPOILER] And unfortunately I didn't enjoy watching it that much. I was actually kind of looking forward to it being over. (09/06/2021)

Despite my original intention, I am not going to start my commentary by comparing this movie to Shinkai's previous works (and especially the last one), but I will start with what makes this movie unique compared to his previous works. Well: what the movie definitely excels at is its excellent depiction of the struggles of precocious teenagers and the conflict the naive main heroes have with reality, as they discover that a 15-year-old kid does not just become a real adult overnight. More than once while watching it, I was reminded of reading Kafka on the Shore, where Murakami also managed to handle similar issues brilliantly. Shinkai deserves another notch for one of the most accurate treatments of everyday life in Japan I have ever seen in anime - Western audiences may not appreciate it as much, but I could not help but notice how even the Japanese audience in the room giggled at it, the unexpected care and attention to minute detail with which Shinkai depicts life in a familiar Tokyo, in an effort to capture reality as faithfully as possible, and it is remarkable that so many well-known companies gave their permission for product placement in the movie without any need for inventing fake company names. In addition, anyone who perhaps disliked the narrative ambiguity, entanglement and fatefulness in Your Name should consider watching this movie, as Weathering with You offers a much clearer, perhaps one could say civil, story that is more accessible to a wider audience than its predecessor (and I do not mean that as a criticism). On the other hand, Shinkai's trademarks that were present in his previous films - Tokyo, trains, melancholy, piano music, sunsets, rain - are of course present here too, and again, by the bucketload, with the weather even playing a major role. So how does it compare to Your Name in the end? There are many crossover points (the main character from the preceding movie even makes a brief appearance!), so the comparison is simply unavoidable, however Weathering with You surprisingly does not come out of the comparison badly at all. It is a very well crafted piece of work, but it does not have the "wow effect" of its predecessor, and while I believe that this may have been intentional to some extent, I also found the movie lacking in a more careful introduction of the characters' family backgrounds, especially that of Hodaka, and of a stronger catharsis at the end - Shinkai unfortunately laid out his cards about 10 minutes ahead of time, leaving the ending itself with nothing to surprise and impact the audience. The bottom line is - a movie that definitely stands on its own two feet and is well worth seeing, it just has the misfortune of following a very successful predecessor and the expectations were set damn high for it. A strong 4 stars. (Seen at Shinjuku Piccadilly, Tokyo, 8/2019.) (02/09/2019)

Une histoire romantique à Tokyo sur un adolescent de seize ans qui, après s'être enfui de chez lui, tombe amoureux d'une jeune fille orpheline du même âge que lui et qui sait arrêter la pluie et faire venir le soleil à volonté, mais qui le paie cher à chaque fois. Honnêtement, c'est un film incroyablement beau sur la force de l'amour, le désir de liberté et la lutte épuisante pour survivre dans une grande ville, qui disparaît peu à peu sous les couches d'eau. On peut aussi le lire comme un commentaire métaphorique sur les variations climatiques extrêmes qui se multiplient ces derniers temps. Son seul inconvénient est qu'il ressemble vraiment beaucoup aux films précédents du réalisateur, en particulier à son film Your Name, qui était en outre plus riche en histoire, plus mystérieux et plus émotionnel. Par moments, on dirait presque que Makoto Shinkai voulait reproduire son succès après celui de son précédent film, et qu'il a donc utilisé la même formule (un couple de jeunes amoureux unis par une capacité fantasmatique magique) et l'a à nouveau agrémentée de ses motifs préférés (la métropole animée, la pluie, les trains, la bande originale, la menace d'une catastrophe, le risque de perdre l'être aimé). Il croyait que ça allait fonctionner de la même manière, et bien sûr, ça fonctionne, juste que cette fois-ci, le résultat est un peu plus évident, plus direct et la dramatisation artificielle, le plus souvent à travers des poursuites policières. Le dénouement aurait pu être beaucoup plus long et surprenant. Néanmoins, Shinkai confirme à nouveau sa position de maître dans la maîtrise des détails et des images poétiques, dans les dialogues, dans la fidèle représentation de l'environnement et dans la narration qui parvient à toucher le cœur comme il le faut. (21/10/2019)

As I personally wasn't blown away by Shinkai's previous highly successful work, I approached Weathering with You with a reserved attitude thanks to the reactions around me, and probably enjoyed the film more than I would have expected because of that. Where anime manages to captivate me with an unrecognized intensity compared to other styles is in those beautiful, sweeping images with breathtaking detail and harmony. I would rechristen Shinkai the best anime documentarian because his worlds are breathtakingly captivating, perversely perfect, meticulously scripted, and to the satisfaction of us all, he doesn't want to stop for a moment! There isn't a scene where the camera doesn't, at least for a moment, pan to the drops on the windowsill or turn the clouds into a woozy model. The whole film is drenched with water in all its various states from beginning to end, until I forgot what was actually happening on the screen. And perhaps good for Shinkai, because while he's a very capable director, on the other hand he's an incredibly stubborn screenwriter. The story had a solid, weighty beginning and was sailing along until we encounter the main element of Shinkai's classic magical realism: the main couple's relationship interwoven with a dose of the supernatural. The "happy" part didn't brim with any deeper substance and failed to buy me enough. There's not enough smiling and sunshine being doled out, the other characters' side stories don't have the strong grounding and continuity with the main one that I would have liked, and then when it comes to resolving that oh-so-unhealthily over-plotted conclusion and denouement, it has all the pull of an engine running at half speed. I liked the idea of using Hina's powers, but this plus was more than outweighed by the over-repeated allusions to age, which ultimately felt like more of a hindrance than the cranky weather. We're not on supernatural levels, are we, so why, why? The conclusion was a decent smattering of odd decisions by several characters, so I appreciated the finish afterwards in the form of a return to magical scenes to soothe the soul. For this alone, I'd recommend Shinkai leave the script to someone else, as it's the last (and huge) march to the very top for me. Oof. And I'm going to pat myself on the back for managing to comment on this without comparing it to the very similar Your Name. A weaker 4 stars. Tokyo is scary (27/04/2020)