After Makoto Shinkai‘s Your Name went on to break many box-office records, fans have been wondering when they would get to see what he was cooking up for his next big film.
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The wait is now over as CoMix Wave Films have officially announced Makoto Shinkai’s next film is titled Tenki no Ko: Weathering With You. You can check out the first poster and official announcement for the new film below.
Opening in Japan on July 19, 2019, with a confirmed release in other territories following later, Tenki no Ko: Weathering With You (Weathering Child: Weathering With You) follows a high school student named Hodaka who leaves his island home and moves to Tokyo. He’s immediately broke from the move and lives his life in isolation, but soon finds a job writing for a strange occult magazine. The weather’s been terrible, with rain every day since he had got this new job, until he meets a young woman named Hina. Hodaka finds that although Hina lives with her brother through outside circumstances, the two are happy. Also strangely enough, Hina has the power to control the weather.
Makoto Shinkai will direct and write the film for CoMix Wave Films, Masayoshi Tanaka returns from Your Name to design the characters, Atsushi Tamura will serve as animation director, and Hiroshi Takiguchi will serve as art director. Tenki no Ko: Weathering With You stars Kotaro Daigo as Hodaka Morishima and Nana Mori as Hina Amano, though it’s currently unconfirmed whether or not the main character names will directly translate the same way in the full film.
Shinkai teased this new work earlier this year as he mentioned that his next work would most likely focus on boys and girls in adolescence. His previous films have touched on those very subjects in the past, with two characters often crossing social, economical, philosophical boundaries. And in the case of Your Name, even time.
If you aren’t familiar with Your Name, you should know that the film is the most successful anime feature of all-time. The film debuted in Japan in 2016 and quickly earned more money than any of Studio Ghibli’s iconic films, beating out Spirited Away to become one of the highest-grossing anime features in the global market. Your Name is a beautiful, nostalgic love story between two star-crossed lovers. It follows two high school students after they discover they spontaneously switch bodies. Rather than panic, the pair find a way to work out their supernatural exchanges and begin to fall for one another. But, when the phenomena comes to an abrupt halt, the would-be lovers learn how cruel both fate and time can truly be.
