Apr 11, 2019

The first teaser: "Weathering with you" is a follow-up to Makoto Shinkai's "Your name

Following the 2016 release of Your Name, his fifth long-form film, Japanese director Makoto Shinkai gained major international acclaim and broke box office records. Three year later, his new film, Weathering With You, is ready to land in theaters, and Toho, its Japanese distributor, has released the first teaser.

The one-minute clip hints at the plot of Weathering with You, which is about Hodaka (voiced by Daigo Kotaro), a teenage boy who leaves his small town for the Japanese capital. To make a living, Hodaka takes a job as a writer at a mysterious occult publication where he meets a girl, voiced by Nana Morishima, who can control the weather at will.

Last December during a press conference announcing the film, Shinkai told reporters that he had focused on the weather for this project because it's a topic familiar to everybody, adding “I've been working on creating a very real entertainment piece that will make you laugh, cry, and say, 'It's so thrilling,' as well as arouse your intellectual curiosity.”

Expectations are high for Weathering with You given that Your Name dethroned Ghibli's Spirited Away as the highest-grossing anime film of all time, earning $357.9 million worldwide.

The production studio for the film is Comix Wave Films. Shinkai wrote the script, in addition to directing. Key talent involved includes Masayoshi Tanaka (character designer), Atsushi Tamura (animation director), and Hiroshi Takiguchi (art director).

Weathering with You opens in Japanese cinemas on July 19, 2019. No U.S. release date or distributor is set at this time.