If you haven’t experienced the joys of seeing Makoto Shinkai‘s animated work in theaters, you’ll have another chance in the new year, as his animated film Weathering with You will get a nationwide release through Fathom Events on January 15, and then get a limited release through GKIDS a few days later.
Shinkai is coming off the world-wide acclaim he received for his previous 2016 film Your Name, and I had a chance to see his entire filmography last year when my local theater the Metrograph did an unprecedented retrospective of Shinkai’s work.
What makes Weathering with You slightly different is that GKIDS involvement might guarantee that this movie gets into the Oscar conversation, and not just in the animated feature category either. Japan has submitted Shinkai’s new film as its official selection for the 92nd Annual Oscars’ newly-titled “International Feature Film” category. It is the first time in 20 years when an Anime film has received this honor. It has to get past over 90 other international features (mostly non-animated) to get through the process that will weed that category down to five nominations, so it still stands a better chance at taking on Disney in the Animated Feature category.
Weathering With You has a particularly fun premise about a high school boy who befriends a girl who might be able to control the weather, which sounds very much like something we might see from the esteemed filmmaker.
You can check out the second trailer below, and if you happen to be in New York this weekend for CrunchyRoll’s Anime NYC 2019, you can catch the East Coast premiere of Weathering with You on Sunday, November 17 at 3pm at the Javits Center’s 2,000 seat Special Events Hall. I know I’ll be there.
Check out the trailer below, and you can learn more about the movie here.
