The central setting for Your Name was an idyllic village on the shore of a lake; by contrast, Weathering With You takes place in the most drably coloured version of Tokyo I can recall from any movie, animated or otherwise. But that isn’t the putdown it might seem: there’s a melancholic romance to the vision of a brownish-grey city where the sky is always overcast and it rarely stops raining. (“Rain” is even the name of a kitten who shows up from time to time, with fur the same steel grey as most of the skyscrapers, and adorably mean eyes.) To this seemingly unwelcoming urban jungle comes the film’s hero, teenage runaway Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo). Starving and broke on arrival, he’s provided with a haven by Mr Suga (Shun Oguri), a shifty but not ill-natured hustler who publishes and edits a magazine specialising in the paranormal, aided by a younger woman (Tsubasa Honda) who may or may not be his mistress. In exchange for room, board and a minimal wage, Hodaka does odd jobs around the office and is occasionally sent out on journalistic assignments – all of which is again presented, not entirely unreasonably, as if it were the most romantic thing in the world.

Before long, he finds a further ally in Hina (Nana Mori), an orphan close to his own age who describes herself as a “100 per cent sunshine girl”. That is, she has the uncanny ability to dispel the constant rain, though only for short periods and in isolated areas – a talent she and Hodaka turn to their advantage in a sideline business of their own. These powers, however, don’t come without a price. It’s here that Shinkai uses the same trick he did in Your Name, hooking us with a teen romance before pivoting to show that the stakes of the story are much higher than anticipated. In this case, however, the stakes are never defined as precisely as they might have been: it's not that every detail of the fantasy needed to be explained, but the climax would have more power if we were better able to understand the gravity of the characters’ choices. The climax would have more power if we were better able to understand the gravity of the characters’ choices. At the level of theme, too, the film can be frustratingly vague. It is tempting to suppose that Shinkai intends some kind of statement about climate change, given that the phenomenon is literally central to the plot. But he avoids addressing the real-world implications too directly, though it would seem that his attitude is more fatalistic than otherwise.

All that aside, Weathering With You is often captivating and always beautiful to look at. The visual approach is paradoxical, in a way which again is familiar from Your Name: the characters and objects in the foreground are presented in a simplified, stylised fashion, while the less tangible aspects of reality that go under the name of “weather” – rain, mist, shards of light – are given a treatment closer to photorealism. Somewhere in between are the cityscapes in the background, which resemble architectural drawings, diagrammatic yet exact, all of which is keeping with an aesthetic that aims to maintain a balance between the solid and the diffuse, the explicit and the hidden. Perhaps this balance is the real subject of Weathering With You, at least when the film is at its poetic best. Who could resist the argument that a cloud can contain as much water as a lake, and that therefore an entire unknown ecosystem might be hidden up in the sky?