#Weathering With You TV Screening To Have Special Ending, Makoto Shinkai Teases Next Movie’s Premise

Weathering With You, the 2019 anime movie that became the 13th highest-grossing movie in Japan, will have a special ending for its TV screening on TV Asahi on January 3, 2021. The ending is about one minute long and is supervised by director Makoto Shinkai himself. 

As reported by Comic Natalie, the special ending was made to give shape to the message contained in Weathering With You‘s English title (the Japanese title was Tenki no Ko, which means “weather child”, with Weathering With You being its subtitle instead). The message is, “I want to overcome the harsh weather and difficulties with you.” The article also made note of the broadcast’s timing, with Japan welcoming a new year after going through the COVID-19 pandemic-hit 2020. The screenshots below are preview images from the special ending.

As translated by translator Jake Jung on Twitter, the words in the screenshot of male protagonist Hodaka say, “All I can do is keep on living,” while the words in the center screenshot say, “I’ll go on living in this world.”

In other Shinkai-related news, Anime News Network reported that the director had revealed hints of what his next movie was about in an interview with TV Asahi. The upcoming movie has the theme of “What happens after the end”, and the script has the “mood of the times… indelibly etched into” it.  The latter is due to Shinkai beginning the writing process during the period in which the Japanese government declared a state of emergency because of COVID-19. 

ANN quoted Shinkai as saying, “It’s a story where something major happens that one’s own power can’t do anything to affect. By making this film, I want a part of people to think, ‘We’ll somehow manage to get by, won’t we?’ The coronavirus is a large-scale disaster, but over the decades of our lives, we’ll experience many forms of disaster, I think. Many things in society will come to a dramatic end, or be dramatically changed, but even after that, people will continue to find a way to survive.

“In a changed world, people nevertheless manage to find a bit of joy in their lives. Right now, I want to make a film that shows what happens after the apocalypse. Something will end. It is not a film where there is something that has to be held at bay. In the midst of a changed world, what kind of adventures will play out? How will people get in touch with their feelings? How will people live and overcome the shock of change? I want to make a film that depicts the things that we have to confront after the end of the world.”