'Weathering With You' Trailer: 'Your Name' Director Makoto Shinkai Delivers Another Visually Stunning Film

Three years after Makoto Shinkai delivered his acclaimed 2016 masterpiece Your Name, the anime director is delivering what looks to be another gorgeous, visually stunning film with Weathering With You. And based on the trailer, Shinkai's follow-up film will be just as cerebral and ambitious as his 2016 mega-hit. Watch the Weathering With You trailer below.

Makoto Shinkai and rain, what else could you ask for? The director has always had a talent for crafting simple, elegiac stories around breathtakingly photorealistic animation, and Weathering With You  (Tenki no Ko, or "Weather Child" in Japanese) looks to live up to that standard, though with a more ambitious sci-fi twist than he's attempted in the past.

The upcoming film, which stars Kotaro Daigo and Nana Mori, "follows a lonely high school student who moves to Tokyo where he encounters dreary days and meets a girl who, due to strange circumstances, can control the weather," according to The Film Stage. So it seems like Shinkai will be doubling down on the metaphysical elements that he explored in Your Name, in a film that feels like a spiritual successor to his 2016 film. The film also features the music of the Radwimps, the band that provided the memorable songs of Your Name.

Shinkai's last film, Your Name, was a mammoth box office hit in Japan, becoming the highest grossing film of 2016 and the 12th-highest-grossing non-English film worldwide, with a total gross of $358 million. It remains one of the best box office performers in Japan, bested only by Spirited Away, Titanic, and Frozen. It was released to universal acclaim in the U.S. in 2017, including from yours truly.

There's no doubt that Shinkai will deliver another stunner with Weathering With You. But can it match the box office heights of Your Name. We'll have to see once it opens in Japan on July 19, 2019. There is no set U.S. or international release date yet.