Director Makoto Shinkai shares a sneak peak at his upcoming anime movie, and it looks as beautiful as you’d expect.

It’s almost hard to believe that Your Name is almost three years old. Since its release in 2016, no other anime film has achieved anywhere near the level of critical, popular, and commercial success that director Makoto Shinkai’s masterpiece has.

But at just 46 years old, Shinkai still has plenty of stories to tell, and we’re just a few months away from his next. In December, we got our first look at the poster for Shinkai’s upcoming theatrical feature Weathering with You (titled Tenki no Ko, or “Children of the Weather” in Japanese), and now the director is letting us see the first actual images from the movie itself.

First up is a shot of male lead Hodaka Morishima, a teen runaway who finds his way from rural Japan to Tokyo, where he gets a job working for a magazine investigating occult occurrences. It’s not clear exactly why he has such a big smile on his face while getting drenched, but perhaps it’s because it’s during a thunderstorm that he meets…

…Haruna Amano, a girl who has the ability to make the rain stop and the skies clear by saying a prayer.

▼ The results of Haruna’s power

The visuals show that Shinkai will once again be making full use of the vivid, high-contrast color design that’s become his visual signature, with the switch from dark clouds to blue skies feeling instantly liberating even in this series of three stills. Everything being covered in freshly fallen rain also gives the anime’s visual effects team free rein to render everything in the glimmering sheen that Shinkai, and his fans, love.

Story-wise, we haven’t gotten any new details from what was announced in December: that Hodaka moves to Tokyo, where he meets Haruna and her younger brother. Wit the first kanji of Haruna’s name (陽) meaning “sun” and the first of Amano (天) meaning “heaven” or “divine,” it seems like there’s going to be some connection to Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess, and her younger brother Susanoo, the storm god. Odds are, though, just like with the pre-release marketing for Your Name, Shinkai will elect to keep the plot details largely under wraps until Weathering with You premiers on July 19.

Source: Twitter/@tenkinoko_movie
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