'Weathering With You' Trailer: Japan's Gorgeous Oscar Contender Gets A January 2020 Release Date

Makoto Shinkai's highly anticipated follow-up to his sublime 2016 hit Your Name has been on a hot streak since its summer premiere in Japan, where it became the country's biggest box office hit of the year. Since then, Weathering With You has earned raves at every film festival it has opened at, including the Toronto International Film Festival where it made its North American premiere. The cherry on top of Weathering With You's successful summer was its submission to be Japan's entry for Best International Film — a first for an anime film since Princess Mononoke in 1998.

Now GKIDS, the film's U.S. distributor, has released a new Weathering With You trailer along with an official release date...for 2020. Yes, we'll have to wait another three months until we see Shinkai's acclaimed sci-fi romance, but at least we have a gorgeous new Weathering With You trailer to tide us over.

Weathering With You Trailer

GKIDS has released a new Weathering With You trailer, which spotlight's the films gorgeous visuals and lovely soundtrack by Radwimps, the band that provided the memorable songs of Your NameWeathering With You follows a lonely high school student who moves to Tokyo and encounters a girl who has the power to control the weather.

It's a simple sci-fi storyline that has captured the imaginations of audiences across Japan — and hopefully will do the same as the film expands internationally, with a U.S. release date set for January 17, 2020. But the film will be competing alongside 2019 films at next year's Oscars, thanks to an awards-qualifying limited run later this year. Japan is gunning for Weathering With You to earn a slot in the Best International Film category at the Oscars — but could Shinkai's film get a Best Picture nod? We'll have to wait until January (!) to see.

Here is 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, Hodaka 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, Hodaka 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...

Weathering With You will open in select theaters for an awards-qualifying run in 2019 before opening wide on January 17, 2020.