Posted in the movie thread, but lolllllll at Shinkai's
Weathering With You as someone that's been watching his stuff from the start and is a fan (although Place Promised in Our Early Days was baaad and I haven't seen Garden of Words but from what I understand it's generally not well reviewed and considered his 2nd weakest after Place Promised).
The process of watching Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You:
Hmmm, direction seems kinda off. His stuff is usually narratively very tight -> ok, this story is really weird, I don’t even know if Miyazaki in his prime could make this work -> hahaha, wat -> ooohhhh boyyy -> time to leave the theater quickly.
At first I thought this was maybe a writer/director under stress of trying to come up with something new & great after being made super famous and probably rich with Your Name.
But duckroll pointed out to me that Shinkai’s good movies are all essentially the same movie over and over with Your Name being kinda the perfection of what he does aka guy & girl separated by distance, space, time with poetic waxings and nice art.
And when he tries to write a story outside of that...he has issues.
Weathering with You is a pretty bad story concept and the directing feels messy like he didn’t have a lot of faith in it and was just sorta flailing around hoping it would come together
And then there’s the whole climate change is
spoiler (click to show/hide)
the natural process of sky turtles & dragons and tokyo was originally underwater so we’ll all be ok!
Theme which is hilariously misguided wtf.
I read an interview afterwards where he is like well I wanted to make a movie about climate change because it’s a thing now, but I wanted to strip out all political messages to appeal to everyone and wanted to show both sides of the weather. Lol
So he wanted to make a movie about climate change without actually saying anything about climate change and by including climate change denial arguments he essentially made a family friendly climate change denial movie lol
What a mess
but hey it made $200 million already! So he gets to continue to be a success in Asia.