The Blackberry Walk

Shinkai makes "Stories about a boy and a girl who are always stretching out their hands towards each other. And yet the boy's hand never reaches the girl's crotch" -Tomino

Shinkai's conception of woman is that they dwell in the sky. They are elusive and cannot be found. For Shinkai, man can only stretch out their hand to the heavens and pray that the hand shall be taken in divine union. Carl Jung talks about the idea of passive eros in a man with regards to the anima. Passive eros (the anima in a man governing the eros) is when a man believes that the world will happen to them. That a divine lady from the sky will arrive and save him - much like an intervening mother. Indeed, a passive eros is that of the mother - a maladapted eros which hasn't developed past the stage of mother, which hasn't formed itself as an entity separate. This is the m'lady malady which forms the nice guy who believes that women should come to him. Precisely speaking, Shinkai is a cuck. But Shinkai is trying to get over his cuck-ness one step at a time. In this session of Shinkai's prolonged psychodrama, he attempts to imagine what it must be like to be an assertive man - an active eros. Yet he struggles, he really does, to give an accurate imagining of what that must look like. Throughout the film something always feels off, something always feels unrealistic but not in a fantastical metaphoric way, but rather in a 'I don't understand what it's like to be a man' way. In his assessment, Tomino was dead on in psychoanalysing Shinkai. Weathering with You is a compensatory fantasy for Shinkai to project his repressed eros which is itself underdeveloped. The gun - a seemingly nonsensical plot device with which the story progresses with his arrest, etc - is, in fact, symbolic of Shinkai's own phallus. He uses his gun to first rescue the girl (albeit misfiring...) and, after that whirlwind of activity, finds the gun again in the climactic scene where he points the gun at policemen, typically emblematic of authority, paternity, and the father figure. The policemen, also, stand around pointing guns at the protagonist. The protagonist, therefore, needs to keep hold of and fire his own phallus to protect himself from the father authority. Shinkai's repressed feelings of disrespect towards the father are wrapped up in his own Oedipal fantasy. Because of Shinkai's father complex, he fantasises about him rebelling against the father but, in reality, he is unable to do so. And because he is not able to go beyond the father figure, his eros will always remain passive, since, without killing your father (metaphorically, of course), you cannot reclaim the mother-imago to be projected onto other women. Again, Tomino's analysis is correct. Shinkai can only imagine grabbing his own crotch, not the crotch of the girl, even in his projected fantasies. Therefore, from the work Weather with You, I believe that Shinkai has a father complex, is a virgin, a nice guy and a cuck.