Love Hina

It’s hard to believe that, being an anime fan since my childhood watching ‘Robotech’ and ‘Battle of the Planets,’ I have never reviewed an anime film until now.  I just don’t get to see a lot of anime on the big screen, the last two being Mamoru Oshii’s visually stylish but frustrating ‘Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence’ (2004) and Hayao Miyazaki’s strange but excellent ‘Spirited Away’ (2002) over 15 years ago, and before that Miyazaki’s ‘Princess Mononucleosis,’ I mean 'Mononoke' (1997) and Katsuhiro Otomo’s mindblowing cyberpunk classic ‘Akira’ back in 1988.  Now I can add a fifth anime movie I’ve seen at a theater in over 30 years, Makoto Shinkai’s romantic fantasy ‘Weathering with You.’

 

WWY is the story of 15-year old high schooler Hodaka, who jumped on a ship and ran away from his boring small town for a better life in bustling Tokyo, where he tries to get a job but lives as a vagrant when not sheltered by struggling magazine publisher Suga, whom he met on the ship.  One day, fate (in this case an act of kindless at a McDonald’s) made his acquaintance with another minimum wage-earning teenager named Hina, whom he’s (though at first he wouldn’t admit) smitten with and seems to possess magical powers in controlling the weather and bring a ray of localized sunshine to Tokyo’s perpetual state of gloomy unrelenting rain (brought about by climate change perhaps).  Their growing friendship and personal struggles form the basis of this movie.

 

Unlike the other four anime movies I’ve seen in theaters (though admittedly I’ve seen countless movies and anime TV series on DVD’s and digital streaming), I didn’t plan to watch WWY and chanced upon it by accident.  To be honest I only saw it because it happened to be showing at my local theater and I’m entitled to three movies a week via my movie membership, but I am glad I did because WWY is a wonderful story of hope, heartbreak and joy tinged with yearning and melancholy.  To the uninitiated this film can be a tad bizarre and overly melodramatic, but to anime fans it's fairly par for the course.

 

Grade: A