The shadow of Your Name looms large over the modern anime industry. It was the first film to break Spirited Away’s box office records, the first post-Miyazaki movie to become a universal international anime staple, a staggering achievement of visual imagination and heartfelt melodramatic storytelling that has redefined the popular consensus of what “normie anime” can be. On top of that, it was something of a personal peak for its director, Makoto Shinkai. After a decade of being every anime hipster’s darling, Shinkai broke into the mainstream and delivered an anime blockbuster fit to stand among the best of the best. Not by abandoning any of the narrative or stylistic flourishes he built his name upon- hyper-realistic background art, stories about lovers separated by circumstances outside their control, high melodrama, mellow J-Rock soundtracks, a fascination with trains as imagery and symbolism- but by repackaging them into their most complete form yet. Your Name was a staggering accomplishment, universal in its appeal and yet incredibly specific and personal in how it approached its genre-bending, larger-than-life fantasia of lovestruck teens reaching for each other across an impossible divide. It was the kind of movie that makes you wonder if there’s even anywhere else to go. It felt like Shinkai had reached the apex of a mountain he’d been climbing ever since he started his career as a director. But no matter what he did next, it was inevitably gonna be compared- and compared poorly- to the thrill of making it to the peak in the first place. Where do you even go once you’re at the top? Sit still and stagnate? Climb down and try another mountain? How do you follow up on a success like Your Name without it feeling like a step back?

Well, with Weathering With You, Shinkai has found the perfect answer to that question: just defy the laws of physics and climb up into the sky.

Yes, believe it or not, I honestly think Weathering With You is a better film than Your Name. Not by much, mind you; we’re talking two very similar movies that definitely operate more or less on the same wavelength. Much like its spiritual predecessor, Weathering With You is a massive, melodramatic blockbuster marrying a sprawling, beautiful epic with a tender, intimate teenage romance, set against the endless expanses of nature and urban life alike. It even brings back Radwimps for the soundtrack and features cameos from Taki and Mitsuha, just to make the fanboys extra happy. This movie isn’t an evolution of the form like Your Name was: it sits very comfortably in the same wheelhouse of story and style. Honestly, Your Name even has it beat on the structural front. Weathering’s midsection has some haggard pacing where it feels like things are moving a little too fast to set up the pieces for the big emotional climax, whereas Your Name was a rock solid script all the way through. But the ideas this movie is tackling, and the boldness with which it tackles them, are so jaw-dropping and exciting that the entire package feels just that much more rewarding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie, anime or otherwise, go this big, in these ways, to this specific end, let alone with this much confidence and self-assured grandeur. It’s a lightning bolt of inspiration, a towering spectacle of imagination, and definitive proof that Shinkai’s blockbuster turn has resulted in his most exciting, electrifying work yet.

The story centers around Hodoka, a 16-year-old runaway who leaves his isolated island home behind to try and live on his own in towering, terrifying Tokyo. This proves difficult, as there aren’t many ways for a high school dropout to make a living, but he eventually finds some measure of security working for a trashy occult magazine, forming a kind of working family with the only two other workers there. Things don’t get much easier, though, as Tokyo’s currently going through its longest, wettest rainy season in a long time. Over a month of near-continuous rain has passed, and it’s still showing no signs of letting up. No one’s quite sure why this extreme weather is occurring, but Hodoka makes do as best he can. And then, one day, he runs into Hina, a girl slightly older than him with a mysterious power: by praying to the heavens, she can part the clouds and make the sun appear. Just for a small amount of time, and just for a limited patch of sky, she can stop the rain. It turns out she’s a runaway as well, and she’s struggling to provide for herself and her elementary-school brother Nagi. So Hodoka comes up with a plan: they can sell her powers as a service, charging people to bring forth the sun for them. That way, they can support each other and provide public service for the many people of Tokyo in need of a sunny day. Thus, they begin to brighten up the Tokyo skies one prayer at a time, and they quickly realize that together, they share a happiness neither of them could dream of finding alone. But it’s only a matter of time before they discover the true nature of Hina’s powers… and the ultimate cost attached to them.

To say more would spoil this movie’s best moments, so I’ll leave my plot synopsis there. Suffice to say, if you’ve seen Your Name, you won’t be surprised at how fantastical and grandiose things eventually get. This movie is big, big, big, with big emotions and big plot turns and huge sweeping shots of some of the most gorgeous animation ever put to cinema. It really is astounding just how fucking good Shinkai’s movies look, especially now that he’s got a basically unlimited budget to realize the images in his head. Colossal metallic skyscrapers, intricately detailed cityscapes, lavishly rendered droplets of rain splattering against the pavement, interior shots bursting with lived-in detail, seamlessly fluid camera movements and character animation, flawless integration of CG backgrounds with 2D foregrounds, the juxtaposition of majestic cities and majestic nature… if any director’s work could be said to perfectly embody the idea of “beauty,” it would be Shinkai. And that’s all without getting into Radwimps’ tonally flawless J-rock orchestrations, or the stuff too spoiler-y to talk about when starts going full fantastical wonderland. I could spend the rest of this review just running down all the individual shots, animation cuts and music drops that took my breath away, and I’d still run long before I even came close to finishing. It’s just that fucking beautiful.

But it’s the characters and the journey they undergo that truly pushes this movie into the stratosphere. As much as I love Your Name, I’ll be the first to admit that it doesn’t have the most interesting characters. Taki and Mitsuha are pretty familiar archetypes, and their various friends and allies only have so much personality between them. Weathering With You, though? Every single character is fantastic. Hodoka’s equal parts awkward, snarky, sincere, stressed out, and determined, and he shoulders the movie’s most demanding moments with real fire. Hina’s a delightful ball of sunshine who nevertheless has a powerful, achingly sincere inner life full of trouble and torment. And my god, their chemistry together is infectious. They’re both kids caught between the playful immaturity of teenagers and the weighty responsibility of adults, and the story lets them walk that line with all the happiness and anxiety it entails. In fact, it’s safe to say that this movie’s ultimate theme is about learning to straddle that tension, growing up into maturity without growing out of the things that make life worth living. And they’re ably assisted by a supporting cast of equally lovable, equally fleshed-out comrades. From the well-meaning scumbag Suna to the insanely hot, insanely awesome Natsumi, from Nagi’s hilarious eight-year-old ladies’ man game to the countless people we meet for small moments during Hina’s sun-bringing work, this movie has the best characters in Shinkai’s work bar none. They feel like real people, living complex lives and weaving complex relationships as their situation grows increasingly dire. You care for every single one of them, and by the time shit really starts hitting the fan, you’re ready to throw hands to make sure they all make it through okay.

And it’s truly remarkable how far Weathering With You is able to take that investment. Without spoiling anything, this movie’s climax and eventual fallout go to some truly stunning places, places where you feel like you really shouldn’t be cheering for where things are going, but you cheer anyway because that’s how deep its claws have sunk into you. It pits the full weight of apocalypse against the frailty of a single human bond, and somehow that frail bond is what shines the brightest and sings the loudest. In that way, this is the most Shinkai film that Shinkai’s ever made. No matter how huge or majestic his movies get, no matter how gorgeously animated they are, it’s the ache of human connection at their core- finding it, losing it, regaining it- that truly makes them beautiful. And Weathering With You is all about holding fast to that true, intimate beauty, even as grandiose events threaten to overwhelm it with sound and fury. In a world on the verge of collapse, with forces far too powerful to comprehend stirring up a storm of epic proportions, this movie looks into the eye of the hurricane and asks, “isn’t there still anything love can do?” Isn’t the power of human connection stronger than anything the world can throw at us, worth fighting for no matter what must be lost to obtain it? Times change, and the world ebbs and flows, but as long as that constant remains- as long as we are still able to heal each other, know each other, love each other- then there’s nothing on heaven or earth that can bring us down. Cheesy? Unrealistic? Perhaps. But god damn if Weathering With You doesn’t make you believe it.

Weathering With You is a triumph of blockbuster filmmaking on every level. It’s stirring, it’s exciting, it’s so god damn beautiful, and it accomplishes the impossible task of improving upon a movie that already felt like the best it could be. Your Name should’ve been the end of Shinkai’s growth as an artist; instead, he’s proven he’s only just getting started. He’s still capable of surprising us, amazing us, shocking us, and taking us to places we never dreamed he could reach before. I’ve always enjoyed his films a lot, but I’ve never been more excited to see where his muse will take him next. Even if his future works never surpass the bar that Weathering With You has set, I know he’ll never stop trying to shoot the moon all over again. And I can’t fucking wait to watch him try.