With Toy Story 4 and The Lion King scheduled to hit cinemas in 2019, it seems like Disney has got the “best animated film” title all sown up for the year.
Well folks, it seems like we’re getting ahead of ourselves because we have a solid contender – if not outright favourite – for that unofficial accolade in the form of Makoto Shinkai’s next anime masterpiece, Weathering With You.
If you thought he mastered the art of animating tears and rain in 2016’s Your Name, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Never have animated tears looked so beautiful.
After reaching artistic and emotional heights hitherto undreamt of with Your Name, it looks like Shinkai-sensei has somehow managed to follow it up with a film that’s not only twice as beautiful but also just as mind-bending as his predecessor’s gender-bending schtick.
Weathering With You follows a lonely high school student, Hodaka, who moves to Tokyo and meets a girl, Hina, who can somehow control the weather. Yeah, Shinkai-sensei is going all in on the weird metaphysical stuff this time around but hey, it’s worked really well for him in the past.
I don’t know how it’s going to work but you can be certain that his new film will be an emotional rollercoaster that will make you cry and laugh in equal measure based on what is revealed in the new trailer. Get some tissues ready because it’s something special.
For those who can’t understand Japanese, here’s an English-subbed version of the trailer.
If 2 minutes of visual goodness, Radwimps, and animated rain can make me tear up, I can’t even imagine how good the final product will be. Hopefully this will get Shinkai-sensei the long-awaited Oscar nomination he got robbed of a few years ago when Your Name was released.
There’s no doubt Toy Story 4 and The Lion King are going to be special experiences – one is the end of a journey that started when we were kids and the other is a reimagining of one of the all-time great childhood films – but it seems like Weathering With You is bringing that something extra to the table than those other films.
As for when we’ll get Weathering With You, it’s scheduled for release in Japan on July 19 but there are no confirmed dates for its international release just yet. If it doesn’t come to Australia, I’m going to cry and it definitely won’t look as good as the animated tears in the film.