Movie Thoughts: Weathering With You
Jan. 17th, 2020 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThere 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.
The movie looked gorgeous, and that for being set in what seemed mundane Tokyo locations; the visual appeal was more a matter of light and weather, a familiar presence in Makoto Shinkai’s works. That weather amounting to “perpetual rain washing out a summer” reminded me of nonspecific comments that had collected to get me understanding the movie had an environmental theme. In my part of the world the unwelcome change in the weather is too much rain (including the Saturday just before), so it did strike home. To push it too far, though, was to risk thinking it another disingenuous “who can say why it’s happening?” intimation; “doing something about it” became a big part of the movie for a small, endearing group of main characters, however, if in a “fantastic” sort of way.
In other “fantastic situation” set up, the way to a happy resolution can seem as much a matter of authorial fiat as the initial problems. In this movie, though, after a bit of an action sequence what happened packed a lot of ambiguity. It would seem easy to rap the main character and movie’s knuckles for not coping with personal loss for the sake of the group, but I am aware that might tie into mere suppositions about “that’s what Japanese culture demands,” and facing that did layer impact into what had happened, along with the thought the characters had been stuck with a generated and unique dilemma anyway. It might have been reminiscent of the messier conclusions of Makoto Shinkai’s movies before Your Name, but might also wind up harder to just shrug off.
There had been a notice at the start of the movie the end credits would be followed with some “bonus feature” comments from Shinkai, and they did happen to touch on the risk of baiting quick accusations. That notice at the beginning hadn’t been delayed by lots of commercials and unrelated trailers, but there had been one for another anime movie from the same licensor. If that sort of thing is happening more often, it might be that much easier to get into a new habit.
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.
The movie looked gorgeous, and that for being set in what seemed mundane Tokyo locations; the visual appeal was more a matter of light and weather, a familiar presence in Makoto Shinkai’s works. That weather amounting to “perpetual rain washing out a summer” reminded me of nonspecific comments that had collected to get me understanding the movie had an environmental theme. In my part of the world the unwelcome change in the weather is too much rain (including the Saturday just before), so it did strike home. To push it too far, though, was to risk thinking it another disingenuous “who can say why it’s happening?” intimation; “doing something about it” became a big part of the movie for a small, endearing group of main characters, however, if in a “fantastic” sort of way.
In other “fantastic situation” set up, the way to a happy resolution can seem as much a matter of authorial fiat as the initial problems. In this movie, though, after a bit of an action sequence what happened packed a lot of ambiguity. It would seem easy to rap the main character and movie’s knuckles for not coping with personal loss for the sake of the group, but I am aware that might tie into mere suppositions about “that’s what Japanese culture demands,” and facing that did layer impact into what had happened, along with the thought the characters had been stuck with a generated and unique dilemma anyway. It might have been reminiscent of the messier conclusions of Makoto Shinkai’s movies before Your Name, but might also wind up harder to just shrug off.
There had been a notice at the start of the movie the end credits would be followed with some “bonus feature” comments from Shinkai, and they did happen to touch on the risk of baiting quick accusations. That notice at the beginning hadn’t been delayed by lots of commercials and unrelated trailers, but there had been one for another anime movie from the same licensor. If that sort of thing is happening more often, it might be that much easier to get into a new habit.