"Weathering With You"
Hodaka is a teenager who has run away from home, to make a life for himself as a writer in Tokyo. It's not going well: in between constant rain and not finding a place to live, he has ended up with no job. He gets lucky and meets Mr Suga, who runs a magazine detailing the odd and the supernatural, and Hina, a young girl who may or may not have the ability to control the weather...
This was nice. Unlike something like, say "Josee, The Tiger and the Fish", I liked our principle characters, and the side characters are good fun too (a nice one is that Hina's brother is an absolute ladykiller despite being, like, 11); the central relationship is well-sketched out and there are beautiful shots using the weather. It falls for the usual tricks and stumbles of "prestige anime" films like this one: the big grandiose music with blunt-force trauma translation at the key emotional beats, the awkward mumbling of its lead characters, and a rather horrifying plot sort of glossed over. But it's well put together, it's gorgeously animated, well-dubbed (Riz Ahmed is in this! They could have sprung for anybody and they sprung for Riz Ahmed to play one of the cops, I love that) and despite its ending dragging out a little bit (this film could have been an hour and forty) it generally earns its emotional moments and the plot is actually quite nicely observed.
I like it. I'm sorry I was late to this one.
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