It's another international hit movie from Makoto Shinkai, but it wasn't his most successful financially. Your Name made $400 million, Suzume made $300 million and this didn't quite reach $200 million. I can understand that. It's a good, interesting film and I'd recommend it, but it's also darker and uglier than Shinkai's other famous works. Its two teenage protagonists (Hodoka and Hina) are trying to survive in Tokyo without their parents and are capable of making extremely questionable choices. Hodoka's parents were probably abusive, although he avoids the subject. The film's early stretches show Hodoka struggling to survive in a sordid, scary urban environment, while at one point Hina was going to become an underage sex worker.

The film couldn't even be called beautiful, despite superb animation. It has a grotty urban setting, usually in heavy rain.

Things improve later, but even so Hodoka and Hina's response to magic powers is to try to exploit them for money. (We've seen their lives. We can't criticise.) Ultimately, the finale is an apocalyptic subversion of "save the girl" romantic tropes and you could accuse Hodoka of dooming the world for the sake of his girlfriend. (This becomes even weightier if you're reading the film as an allegory for climate change, although Shinkai has said that he was inspired by those issues, but wasn't making a political statement.)

Anyway, the plot. Hodoka's on the run and heading for Tokyo. What's his plan? Seemingly to starve on the streets. Don't rely on him for forward planning, e.g. that finale. He's thoroughly nice, though, and you could safely leave him in charge of huge amounts of cash and naked girls. Nothing would happen.

There are weather children. A Sunshine Girl can bring out a sunny blue sky and make water fall upwards. A Rain Boy makes it rain wherever he goes. (The film never says so, but I can't believe that Hodoka isn't the latter.) That might not sound scary, but this is Japan. Two typhoons hit there within three months of this film's release, bringing record-breaking rainfall and TV footage that looked uncomfortably similar to some of this film. Shinkai finds original, interesting viewpoints on all this.

The film certainly isn't grim or preachy. It's quite fun. Hodoka and Hina are very likeable and I wouldn't even say that Hodoka's final decisions are unambiguously wrong. Our heroes are together again and there are suggestions that this future was always, underneath, meant to be. There's also some entertainingly inadvisable motorbike riding from Natsumi.

If nothing else, I admire Shinkai for following up his feel-good Your Name with something that's the opposite of what you'd expect. It's similar in being at heart a teenage romance, but in other ways it couldn't be more different.