"Weathering With You" and "Promare"

I've been neglecting the anime world recently, and COVID has given me a rare opportunity to catch up. Here are some quick thoughts on the two major titles from last year.

First, Makoto Shinkai's "Weathering With You" is one of the more entertaining titles in his catalogue. I'm not very fond of Shinkai's teen romances, especially the ones that get super introspective and angst-ridden. "Weathering With You" stays fairly light and humorous throughout, even though it features a needlessly Hollywood-style action climax. The characters are better defined, and the fantasy elements are more interesting, occasionally veering into Miyazaki territory in a way that none of the other Shinkai films have before.

Hodaka (Kotaro Daigo) is a runaway teeanger who is having a hard time surviving in Tokyo, but he's taken under the wing of a disreputable publisher, Suga (Shun Oguri), and his assistant Natsumi (Tsubasa Honda). He then befriends a girl named Hina (Nana Mori), who turns out to be a "sunshine girl." Her prayers can temporarily stop the unusual torrential rains that have been plaguing Tokyo for months, and Hodaka helps her turn this skill into a little business. Hina and her younger brother Nagi (Sakura Kiryu) have been recently orphaned after the death of their mother, and are also barely scraping by.

As usual, the biggest selling point of Shinkai's film is its gorgeous visuals. A larger budget has given him the ability to do fuller, smoother animation, and multiple scenes full of rain and cloud effects. The weather is like another character in the film, often driving the plot along and playing a big part in the film's ending. The pace is very lackadaisical, often just following how Hodaka is enjoying his life and finding his tribe, which makes for a very pleasant watch. I like "Weathering With You" more than most of the other Shinkai films because it has a very strong supporting cast - rough-edged Suga, precocious Nagi, and hot-blooded Natsumi are a lot of fun to watch. The specificity of the modern Tokyo setting is also a plus, giving us meticulously detailed beauty shots of busy streets and neighborhoods. So even if Hodaka is the usual romantic idiot teenage hero, and the love story is paint-by-numbers, there's a lot more to see and enjoy.

Now, switching gears entirely, we have "Promare," the wild new action film from Studio Trigger about a dystopian future where the emergence of the pyrokinetic Mad Burnish terrorists has created a world where the fire fighting force of Burning Rescue is treated like a celebrity superhero team. One member of Burning Rescue in particular, Galo Thymos (Kenichi Matsuyama), is deeply committed to his cause, and to protecting the city of Promepolis and its leader Kray Foresight (Masato Sakai). The trouble is, the Mad Burnish are actually being persecuted by Foresight, and in danger of being further victimized as part of his dastardly plot to escape the impending apocalypse. Galo and the Mad Burnish leader, Lio Fotia (Taichi Saotome), have to put aside their differences and team up in order to save the day.

The clear precursor to "Promare" is "Gurren Lagaan," the Studio Gainax adventure series with which it shares key members of the creative team, including director Hiroyuki Imaishi. This isn't just because Galo Thymos is a dead ringer for "Gurren Lagaan" hero Kamina, but because the two anime share a very similar visual sensibility of incredibly kinetic animation, highly stylized designs, and action sequences of epic scope. So much of "Promare" is action scenes, these hugely ambitious scenarios that mix 2D and 3D animation to create impossible, colorful clashes to fill the screen. The bombastic, over-the-top opener was so overwhelming, I was a little worried that "Promare" wouldn't actually have a comprehensible story. Instead, it turns out that "Promare" is a perfectly good science-fiction fable at its core, with a passel of fun characters. It's very comic book level stuff, where every new revelation is underlined several times and adorned with exclamation points, but very enjoyable if you can get on the same wavelength.

I want to emphasize that this is some of the best animation I've seen come out of Japan in a long time. The momentum of the action, and the energy coming out of it is incredible. It's also beautifully designed from top to bottom, utilizing these minimalist shapes and searing neon colors to keep expanding and expanding the scope to the point of ludicrousness. Eventually there are spaceships and trans-dimensional flame aliens involved and the whole planet gets set on fire. It's beautifully bonkers and so much more than I was expecting from a film billed as being about superpowered fire-fighters.
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