Weathering With You, Makoto Shinkai-directed anime film, selected as Japan's entry for Oscars 2020

Weather With You, a Japanese animated romantic drama film, is the country’s official entry for International Feature Film Awards at Oscars 2020. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the announcement was made by the Japan Motion Picture Producers Association (Eiren) on 26 August (Monday). [caption id=“attachment_7228031” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] A still from Weathering With You. YouTube[/caption] This is the first anime to be selected in this category, previously known as Best Foreign Language Film, since Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Monouke in 1998. The climate-change inspired feature recently crossed the $100 million mark at the Japanese box office,  Variety reports. It is the tenth-highest earning Japanese film of all time. This film is Shinkai’s second after Your Name, which grossed $358 million worldwide, to reach this milestone. Weathering With You is scheduled to be screened at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival  alongside other films like the cancer drama The Friend, from Gabriela Cowperthwaite with Dakota Johnson and Casey Affleck,  Hustlers, with Lopez and Constance Wu and Michael Winterbottom’s Greed. The English subtitled trailer reveals the story of a runaway high school boy named Hodaka, from the countryside. After exhausting all his financial resources, he finds a job at a bizarre occult magazine. Hodaka eventually befriends a girl named Hina, who possesses the ability to clear away rain to make way for sunshine at a time when Japan is experiencing perpetual rainfall. THR further writes that Japanese band Radwimps have composed the soundtrack of Weather With You. In an interview with Japan Times, Shinkai had said that the story is quite similar to novelist Haruki Murakami’s book Kafka on the Shore. “It’s possible I unconsciously remembered that novel. However, I do believe that when you break down stories, they all ultimately end up following a few basic structures,” the director had said. The Academy Awards will be held on 9 February, 2020. Watch the trailer of Weathering with You here.