Weathering with You · reception & legacy
2019 · Makoto Shinkai
How Weathering with You has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Landed in 2019 with impossible expectations — the follow-up to Your Name, the biggest anime hit ever — and was received as 'gorgeous, but is it just Your Name again?' It's since been reappraised as the bolder, thornier film: messier, more romantic about defiance, and the one Shinkai defenders now argue is secretly his most interesting.
What's debated
The ending is the whole fight — some call the hero's climactic choice recklessly selfish, others call it the most radical thing Shinkai ever committed to, and neither side has stood down since.
Its footprint
Its rain-drenched, hyper-detailed Tokyo skies became the default screenshot aesthetic of late-2010s anime — the '100% sunshine girl' and those RADWIMPS needle-drops live on in a million edits, wallpapers, and 'weather is emotion now' jokes.
Where it stands
On Letterboxd it's the classic middle-child Shinkai: adored by the faithful, perpetually ranked against Your Name, and a reliable 'actually this one's better' hot take.