Note: This was an article originally written in Mandarin five years ago. The following is an English version of the article, as part of the series 2025, the year promised in our early days.

Image from “Weathering with You”.

Warning: this article contains spoilers of “Your Name” and “Weathering with You”.

In “Weathering with You”, we can see many breakthroughs in Makoto Shinkai’s film. For instance: more focus on the city, more realistic depiction of the dark side of society, and a female protagonist that is younger than the male protagonist.

But perhaps the most impressive of all is that the film defies the fatalistic attitude when dealing with major public issues as alluded in “Your Name”.

Recall that the teleological meaning of the mind exchange between the protagonists in “Your Name” is ultimately to avoid a major catastrophe caused by a meteorite visiting Earth. In other words, the relationship itself is merely the means to a greater end, one that is of course sacred and worth the relatively small trade-off of leaving the precious memories of each other behind. We can go further and argue that there is not even a trade-off presented in the film, since a plausible alternative was never given to the main progatonists.

By virtue of the beautiful scenary and music, “Your Name” romaticizes the sacrifice of its main protagonists. Nevertheless, it might not always be best for a small group of people to take the most burden when facing a large scale catastrophe. This is where “Weathering with You” comes in.

In “Weathering with You”, the protagonists are given an actual moral choice to whether sacrifice or not for the greater good of society. What is different from “Your Name” is that the protagonists this time belongs to groups of marginalized underdogs trying to survive in Tokyo. The film therefore asks us: if a group of marginalized people are already constantly being oppressed under normal conditions, are we (the society as a whole) in any position to demand them to make additional sacrifice when catastrophes hit?

In the end, Hina the “sunny girl” decides to jump off the Cumulonimbus cloud with Hodaka, escaping her fate as a climate Jesus that brings normal weather to mankind. This results in a three-year-long rain in Tokyo and the re-emergence of the inner sea of Edo. While the flooding of downtown Tokyo is without doubt a tragedy, Hina and Hodaka are not the culprits to be blamed for; as Greta Thunberg (Swedish climate activist and early founder of the Fridays for Future movement) might say: “it is not the youger generation who caused climate change, so why should the burden to find solutions being laid onto them?”

This ending of “Weathering with You” is conveying an important message in the principle of climate justice: A solution that demands “man eats man” will always be wrong, and when a catastrophe becomes unavoidable, everyone should bear the blunt of the damage collectively and sympathize with the most deeply affected.

It might also be worthwhile to note that in the very end of the film and just before the credits start rolling, we see Hina (now deprived of any divine power) still prays to the sky for a better weather. None of us have the power to single-handedly end the ongoing climate catastrophe, but each of us should try as much as we could.

Image from “Weathering with You”.