The Japan Motion Picture Producers Association (known as Eiren) announced Monday that Makoto Shinkai’s new hit animated feature Weathering with You will represent the nation’s film industry at the Academy Awards. The teen teen summer adventure with a fantastical twist was selected out of 13 films shortlisted by a committee of seven directors, writers and film critics. The last animated project entered by Japan for the Oscar (now known as the International Feature Film Award) was Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke in 1998.
Weathering with You is currently closing in on the $100 million domestic box office milestone, on track to follow the smash-hit success of Shinkai’s 2016 feature Your Name., which made $358M worldwide and broke the Japanese animated feature record previously held by Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
GKIDS has picked up the film for release in the States and is planning an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run for this year, in a bid for the Best Feature Animation race. The Int’l Feature Film Oscar does not require films to be released in the U.S. for eligibility.
Synopsis: The summer of his high school freshman year, Hokoda runs away from his remote island home to Tokyo, and quickly finds himself pushed to his financial and personal limits. The weather is unusually gloomy and rainy every day, as if to suggest his future. He lives his days in isolation, but finally finds work as a writer for a mysterious occult magazine. Then one day, Hokoda meets Hina on a busy street corner. This bright and strong-willed girl possesses a strange and wonderful ability: the power to stop the rain and clear the sky…
Learn more at www.weatheringwithyoumovie.com.
The 92nd Academy Awards will be held February 9, 2020.
[Source: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety]
