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Weathering with You, the record-breaking animated film to (re)discover this summer
Japanese director Makoto Shinkai’s fifth full-length feature, Weathering with You, has been topping the box office in Japan since its release on July 19th, 2019. With more than €100 million in revenue, this conscious tale about ecology emerged as a must-watch animated film. It confirmed that Studio Ghibli, founded by Hayao Miyazaki, is not the only one to produce high-quality projects.
By Chloé Sarraméa.
Published on 2 September 2020. Updated on 17 July 2026.
In a world where natural disasters are multiplying, the film industry has to denounce the harmful effects of global warming. And that includes the animation scene. Through his ecological tale, Weathering with You (2019), which premiered at the Toronto Festival, Japanese filmmaker Makoto Shinkai stages a teenage love story as a powerful reflection on climate disruption, geopolitics and the responsibility of young people to look after an almost destroyed planet.
Hodaka, a high school student from a remote island, runs away from his rural hometown to reach Tokyo. As he settles in the big city, he meets Hina, an orphaned girl who has the ability to control the weather and light up the daily life of the city dwellers, victims of a damaged climate. Infernal chases through the urban landscape, fantastic aerobatics through the clouds, warm embraces beneath torrential rainstorms… In Weathering with You, Makoto Shinkai takes audiences on a romantic journey verging on supernatural and hyperrealism.
Makoto Shinkai’s fifth feature is the 6th most watched animated film ever on the archipelago. It seals the former video game designer’s entry into the very closed circle of promising animation directors in Japan. The success of his last film, Your Name, in 2016, allowed the self-taught filmmaker to garner more admissions than his counterpart, Hayao Miyazaki. Before that, the notable releases of the short film, She and Her Cat (1999), and the medium-length film, Voices of a Distant Star (2002), placed Makoto Shinkai as the poetic witness of a whole generation. He is also the narrator of a collective story, mixing romance with the disappointments of a youth with no expectations.
With the rainy universe of Weathering with You, the 53-year-old director took the opportunity to send a sublime nod to the father of cinematographic essays, Chris Marker. The latter meditated on the nature of human memory and cultures in his documentary masterpiece Sans Soleil (1983).
Weathering with You (2019) by Makoto Shinkai, available on Apple TV+.
