Oh so the quarantine is extended in my country and to top it off, I’m spending it alone in a dormitory. Oh lala! But I fret not. In fact I am surprised on how well I’m coping with being alone. One that truly helps me right now are bullet journaling and blogging! All the more, I started to doing blogging collaborations for non-Philippine based bloggers. And here is one of them, featuring my collaboration with China-based blogger Libera Tarts!

Which is better from Makoto Shinkai’s famous masterpieces, “Your Name” or “Weathering With You”?

From the time we decided on this topic, Libera have only watched “Your Name” and it’s her favorite movie. Unfortunately , she missed the theatrical showing of “Weathering with You”. That’s the complete opposite for me though. In my timeline, I have watched Weathering first because a friend and a fan of “Your Name” invited me to watch it in theaters. I’m aware how popular “Your Name” is and I’ve been always curious but did not have the chance to actually watch it for years. This blog collaboration gave me a new exciting purpose to finally watch my forgotten copy of “Your Name” in my laptop.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

As Kimi No nawa’s story progresses, I couldn’t help but to see the parallelism of the story to its successor Weathering With You” .

1. Both involves teenager protagonists.

Your Name is about Taki and Mitsuha, ordinary highschool students living miles apart , found themselves swapping bodies one day.

Weathering With You tells a story about a runaway highschooler named Hodaka who met Hina in Tokyo and together, they put a business utilizing Hina’s ability to bring out the sun in a short duration of time.

2. Girl protagonist entangled in a supernatural phenomenon.

In Kimi No Nawa, both of them are involved in a supernatural phenomena. However, it was Mitsuha who has the heritage of body swapping running in their family thorough generation. Her grandmother explained that this happens because of their role as the caretakers of the shrine.

In Weathering With You, Hina was the one who possessed the ability to clear the weather. She got it when one day she was mesmerized to a ray of sunlight and followed it until she reached it on a rooftop. A seemingly magical encounter with mythical creatures happened and she woke up with the ability to clear the endless rain in Tokyo. She was later referred as “Sunshine Girl or the Weather Maiden”.

3. Both are detached from their parents.

There is a lack of parental guardians in both movie. Although in Kimi No Nawa, Mitsuha has a father but they are not closed. She and her siblings felt like they already divorced their father emotionally. and is not living with him. They have their grandmother instead to take care of them. Taki seems to be living independently even as a highschooler.

The same with “Weathering with you”. Hodaka ran away from home. No backstory or whatsoever why. Hina and her adorable brother “Nagisa” were already orphan but Hina proved to be such a dependable sister. She works on part-time jobs and is an incredible chef.

4. Girl protagonist has cute sibling.

In Kimi No Nawa, there is Yotsuha, always grumpy waking her sister up every morning. Sometimes she acts like she’s the older sister. She’s an elementary student. She also performs the family tradition of taking care of the shrine and creating sake through the mouth with Mitsuha.

And then there’s Nagisa of “Weathering With You”. Even as an elementary student, she’s popular with girls. He gives advice to Hodaka like an older brother sometimes. Nagisa is also with them during their weathering gigs.

5. Both has Japanese cultural and Shintoism Sentimentality.

In both films, the Shintoism beliefs were added to the magical realism narrative of both films.

First what is Shinto? Shintoism is a major and an old religion in Japan.To put it simply, this is worshiping the spirits of the nature. In Shinto, you worship the spirit of the wind, the mountainside, and the river. They personifies the nature and call them “Kami” or Gods. That is why in Shinto, there are many “Kami” and they are often worshiped in places like shrine. This also explains why Japanese has high regard to cleanliness as this is the way of being close to God and paying respect.

In “Kimi No Nawa”, Mitsuha and her family upholds the responsibility of taking care of the shrine and making sure that the tradition continues like offering Kuchikamizake “mouth-chewed sake” for the Gods in the rock cave shrine. This has a big role in the plot of Kimi No Nawa as their Kami forged the interweaving and links of time making their body swapping magic to happen.

Weathering With You also makes use of Shinto beliefs and is a big part of the plot. Sunshine brought Hina to this ragged Torii gate which is usually the entrance of any Shinto Shrines and the Kami of heavens eventually made her the weather priestess. The tradition also of praying and performing rituals for clear weather are Shinto practices as well.

An image of a real Torii gate in Japan which signifies a separation of ordinary and sacred place leading to Shinto Shrines.

6. Both get separated with each other for years before re-uniting.

In Kimi No Nawa, the couple reunited after 5 years of the comet crash in Mitsuha’s town. Taki is now searching for a job. All this years, he felt somehow empty but he doesn’t know why because both of them lost memories of their body swapping ventures. Mitsuha feels the same way. At this time she is now living in Tokyo. Their train met in parallel and instantly it struck a chord inside their hearts that they have found what they were looking for. They took off the train and simultaneously looked for each other. In this pivotal moment in the staircase, they suddenly had this awkward moment approaching each other.

Hell yeah! You could not blame them. They could not explain why they seem to long for each other so hard while they haven’t met yet. Good thing Taki broke the ice, turned around and asked if they have met before. Mitsuha quickly replied that it seems like so. And finally, they learned each others names with tears of joy in their eyes.

Now for Weathering with You, the gap was three years. They got separated when the police arrested Hodaka after his successful reclaiming of Hina from being the weather sacrifice. They lost contact of with each other. When he got out of the probationary period, Tokyo is already submerged in flood because of the endless rain since the heavens lost Hina as their weather maiden. He found her one day praying for the Gods in the street. They re-unite and held hands with Hodaka re-assuring her that everything will be fine from now on.

5. RADWIMPS musical score.

Outside of the story, the emotional atmosphere were both performed by a rock group named Radwimp.

Kimi No Nawa – Just a Little More

Tenki No Ko-“Is There Still Anything That Love Can Do?”

With this similarities, parallelism, for me both movies are indeed masterpieces and each has magic on its own. But which is better?

Now please understand that this is my own opinion and I don’t represent any group.

For visual aesthetic of animation and musical scoring, I choose “Weathering With You”. But for overall verdict, I would choose “Kimi No Nawa”. I felt that the story of this piece has more emotional intensity. It made me feel the longing to someone I don’t know or haven’t met yet. I felt the emptiness of searching for someone who would fill the unbearable void inside me. In short I felt more connected with Taki and Mitsuha’s emotions and consistently so throughout the movie. In Weathering With You, I lost it somehow in the chasing scene towards the end. The chasing scene was corny in my preference.

One again I invite you to read Libera’s take on weighing Makoto Shinkai’s masterpieces here mostly on “Weathering With You.” It was a delightful read as she uncovered lot of points that I did not notice myself.

Lastly, I invite you to be my International Blogger Friend. The basic idea is to have at least one blogger friend in each country. In the Philippines where I live, I also have a separate directory called one friend in each PH Region. For more details, just go to this link. I hope you accept my invitation!

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Remember, you are awesome and wonderfully made,

GUREZU

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