After the record-breaking success of Your Name, director Makoto Shinkai put his imagination to work and gave us another story about today’s youth, one with conflicts more inspired by a current issue that plagues us all: global warming. But how accurate is the movie’s depiction, really?
While Weathering With You is visually gorgeous, with enough imagery and realistic sound effects to immerse the viewer in rain-riddled Tokyo, it pins all of its strange weather on the supernatural. Although rain isn’t usually whisked away by a “Sunshine Girl” like Weathering With You’s Hina, there are still many surprising details about our current climate crisis that Shinkai actually got right.
Clouds Technically Have Ecosystems
Early in Weathering With You, a minor character states that while there is little known about the clouds in our skies, there is enough evidence to believe a whole ecosystem exists there. While not to the extent that Shinkai depicts with a green meadow on a cumulonimbus with schools of water-fish flying underneath a serpentine white dragon filling the sky, it is true that clouds have ecosystems.
It’s just on a much, much smaller scale. Clouds have microbial ecosystems. They are a host to tons of unique bacteria and other microbial life that actually has been noted by some studies to affect weather patterns.
Japan Has Been Experiencing Awful Rainfall
It’s no secret that the concept of Weathering With You was inspired by global warming and the significant amount of rainfall that has hit Japan recently. Just this past year in 2019, several rainfall records were “shattered” in early July.
This isn’t too unlike the movie, where several scenes are plunged into the grey, cloudy hues of heavy rainfall until “Sunshine Girl” Hina steps in to bring a ray of light. Shinkai has been praised for how expressively beautiful the colors gleam when the sun finally comes out of hiding after one of Hina’s prayers.
Japan Really Did Have Its Earliest Snowfall In 2018…In August
Just before Weathering With You’s climax, all of the supernatural weather phenomena that have chilled and flooded Tokyo throughout the movie during what would normally be a blistering hot summer manages yet another crazy thing. Characters crossing the busy streets like Hina and Hodaka all stop and stare at the sky as they watch snow start to fall.
Though it wasn’t in Tokyo, Japan did receive its earliest recorded snowfall ever two years ago. Many staying at ski resorts on Hokkaido Island woke up to a strange sight of frosts even though it was August, right in the middle of summer.
Rising Seas Could Sink Some Cities By 2050 (Including Tokyo)
At the movie’s climax, after a daring and romantic move to rescue Hina, Hodaka sacrifices the world’s only chance to see the sun again, condemning it to a lifetime of solid rainfall. This brings a potentially uncomfortable sight of the eventual sinkage of Tokyo three years afterward.
Although not only because of heavy amounts of rainfall and not likely happening under such a short timeline as three years, there are still concerns about global warming causing a drastic rise in sea levels. According to the New York Times, there are predictions that rising seas could, in fact, put several cities at least partially underwater by the year 2050.
There Is Such A Thing As “Climate Grief”
For those who haven’t seen Weathering With You, it may be a bit of a spoiler but not all of the conflicts in the movie end so sunny and cheery. Many of the characters who aren’t Hina and Hodaka are forced to resign themselves to Tokyo’s fate of sinking into the ocean thanks to the constant rain.
Even before this, part of the reason Hina and Hodaka were able to make a pretty legitimate profit off of Hina’s “Sunshine Girl” abilities was that people get miserable under relentless bad weather. These themes touching on people’s feelings related to the doom and gloom of things like global warming hit another thing Shinkai captured just right: “Climate Grief.”
Some Parts Of Tokyo Were Once Underwater
Close to the movie’s end, in a final and important conversation between Hodaka and the grandmother of Your Name’s cameo character Taki, the grandmother reveals that at one point, the land under the very building she lives in was once underwater. She references Tokyo Bay and how, with all the rain, it means the world is just going back to how it used to be.
While it’s difficult to discern if this is the case for where her building is, it is true that some parts of Tokyo were once technically underwater. Tokyo is built on swampland near the Sumida River; there were lots of shallow areas full of water that have, over time, been altered or built over to make it the city we know and love today.
Recorded History Only Goes So Far
However, in the same conversation between Hodaka and the grandmother, the woman makes another key observation that rings a lot of truth: humanity’s recorded history only stretches so far back. In the many, many years of Earth’s lifespan that preceded recorded history, who is to say what we know about what happened?
What if, at some point before humans started to document things, snow fell earlier in Japan than it did in August? What if other strange, abnormal weather occurred? With this line of thinking, it’s easy to see how we get to the next truth about our current climate crisis that Shinkai nails.
The Blame Game, Pt. 1: Humans Aren’t That Important In The Long Run
The Earth is old, and the universe is even older. It’s often humbling just to realize how little space and time we take up in the grand scheme of things if you look at a timeline mapping the growth and development of life on Earth throughout its many eras and periods.
In the end, maybe the old woman in Weathering With You was right. Humans are just a “blip” in the long, long timeline of the world. There’s so little we have power over and so little that we do that matters in the long run. Life on Earth goes on despite everything humans have done to harm it.
The Blame Game, Pt. 2: Humans Can Still Affect The Environment
However, even though strange weather like summer snow and literal blankets of water dropping out of nowhere are explained with supernatural causes, Hina and Hodaka still play a significant role in affecting the world’s future in Weathering With You.
While the many adults around Hina and Hodaka insist Japan’s flooding and constant rainfall is just a result of the world being or returning to something it has always been, Hodaka holds fast to the idea that he and Hina changed everything. It’s an important truth to echo: that even though the world does as it pleases, humans still can and do often play a major role in its wellbeing.
There Is No Single Right Answer To The Climate Change Dilemma
Needless to say, Weathering With You has, just as Shinkai intended, sparked important conversations about climate change. Countless reviews have spun their opinion on what this beautifully-animated movie’s message is and how we should interpret Hodaka’s youthful insistence from the very beginning that he and Hina “changed the world.”
Has the world always been so uncontrollable and cyclical or could eventual flooding be caused by two lovestruck teens? How much can humans change in the world around them? The answer is that there is no single right answer. But what is important is to, even in the midst of such important and depressing issues like climate change, protect the other things in our lives that give us little light.
