'Weathering With You' Trailer: Get Ready To Cry Over The Beautiful Animation Of Makoto Shinkai's 'Your Name' Follow-Up

There's no one who can animate rain like Makoto Shinkai, the director of the 2016 global anime hit Your Name, so it's no surprise that he would make an entire film about a character that can control the weather. Weathering With You looks to be another cerebral sci-fi tearjerker that could potentially earn the filmmaker his long-deserved Oscar nod. Watch the new Weathering With You trailer below.

Weathering With You, which stars Kotaro Daigo and Nana Mori, follows a lonely high school student who moves to Tokyo and encounters a girl who can somehow control the weather. While the film seems to be doubling down on the surreal metaphysical elements Shinkai explored in his record-setting box office hit Your Name, the new trailer for Weathering With You seems to focus on some of the wacky supporting characters and the comedy that comes with them. I'm excited to see Shinkai loosen up a little and bring some more humor to his films — his early films were so stoic and serious, that they don't have the rewatch value of films by a director like the more lighthearted, but still heartfelt Mamoru Hosoda.

Regardless, Weathering With You looks like a magical spiritual successor to Your Name and a worthy follow-up — the film already has its U.S. distribution set for later this year from the animation distributor GKIDS, which has an eye on the animated Oscar nomination that eluded Your Name. The film also features the music of the Radwimps, the band that provided the memorable songs of Your Name.

Here's the synopsis for Weathering With You:

GKIDS proudly presents the highly-anticipated new film from director Makoto Shinkai and producer Genki Kawamura, the creative team behind the critically-acclaimed, global smash hit Your Name. The summer of his high school freshman year, Hokoda runs away from his remote island home to Tokyo, and quickly finds himself pushed to his financial and personal limits. The weather is unusually gloomy and rainy every day, as if to suggest his future. He lives his days in isolation, but finally finds work as a writer for a mysterious occult magazine. Then one day, Hokoda meets Hina on a busy street corner. This bright and strong-willed girl possesses a strange and wonderful ability: the power to stop the rain and clear the sky...

GKIDS has set an awards qualifying run for 2019 with a theatrical release in early 2020 in both the original Japanese and a new English language version.