Movie Thoughts: Weathering With You
Jan. 17th, 2020 08:43 pmThere have been more anime movies getting “special limited theatrical screenings” lately, but even as I noticed them I hadn’t been managing the critical step of looking up if they were playing at theatres near me. That awareness built to enough of a push that when I started seeing notices about Weathering With You approaching, I did make the effort to check the web site for my nearest movie theatre’s chain. More than that, perhaps, I was able to watch “a few extra anime episodes” the weekend before and escape the weighty thought “I’m stuck on a weekly schedule” (with its associated worry all those half-hour, mass-produced TV episodes are “eroding my attention span.”) There were still, though, a few thoughts swimming through my mind that not only had the last time I’d managed to see an anime movie in a theatre been Your Name, by now Makoto Shinkai is “part of the establishment” and I’d have been better off in some obscure, perhaps only self-promoting way to have seen one of the movies I’d missed. Plenty of positive things have been said about Promare.
Still, I headed for the theatre on a mid-weekday evening, getting there in plenty of time. On checking the self-serve ticket kiosks, though, I saw just a few spaces still open at the lowest corners of the seating. A large and youthful crowd drifted into the theatre as I wondered if they were from an anime club at the local university or college, or in fact a high school organization (along with recalling the time I’d seen the Love Live movie with much less of an audience); the front row I was stuck in didn’t fill to capacity, but I didn’t try ascending the steps in the last minutes to see if anything else was left open. Peering up at the screen threatened to put a crick in my neck and might have distorted the picture even as I could sometimes pick out its pixels, but that could also have made the visuals that much more overwhelming.
( Some discussion of the ending )
Still, I headed for the theatre on a mid-weekday evening, getting there in plenty of time. On checking the self-serve ticket kiosks, though, I saw just a few spaces still open at the lowest corners of the seating. A large and youthful crowd drifted into the theatre as I wondered if they were from an anime club at the local university or college, or in fact a high school organization (along with recalling the time I’d seen the Love Live movie with much less of an audience); the front row I was stuck in didn’t fill to capacity, but I didn’t try ascending the steps in the last minutes to see if anything else was left open. Peering up at the screen threatened to put a crick in my neck and might have distorted the picture even as I could sometimes pick out its pixels, but that could also have made the visuals that much more overwhelming.