Weathering With You the movie was fantastic but the manga feels like too close an imitation rather than an adaptation that truly brings the story to a new medium. Its impossible to talk about this without briefly reviewing the movie itself so in short: The movie is fantastic. Makoto Shinkais style of storytelling does not connect with everybody but to those it does it brings out incredibly powerful emotions. I particularly appreciate Weathering With You for how it takes the idea of fantasy explored in his prior films and challenges it rather than be about a fantastical adventure of love and emotion its about a character who seeks those feelings unaware of how immature it is and makes reckless dangerous decisions in conflict with the grounded reality around him that refuses to let him chase that fantasy. Yet the beauty of the story is that it still believes in that fantasy and refuses to conclude that his desires are wrong. How well does the manga adapt this? It does an okay job. Id still give it an 6 because of how strong the core narrative is in a vacuum but as an adaptation it gets a 3 because it has so little ambition to be anything more than an adaptation. Most of the story follows the exact same storyboard beat for beat. There are a few additions extra scenes that say new things about the main characters emotions but they werent nearly enough. The art is fine. Its aesthetically pleasing and has some fantastically drawn twopage spreads. But the paneling style and general flow is my biggest issue the vast majority of scenes tread far too closely to what the movie already did. Its not quite shot for shot but its close enough. Being paneled like a movie isnt always a bad thing but it doesnt do this out of a mangakas vision to create a story with that feeling it lacks a vision of its own on how to make the same story work best as a manga. It doesnt take advantage of anything unique to manga as a medium. Its more like an illustrated script of the film. Because of this rather than bring the story to life in a new way it feels like going through the motions of something youve already seen. But without the beautiful animation colors music or voice acting the experience feels emotionless in comparison. It conjured up constant memories of scenes I loved yet I remembered feeling more than I did in the moment while reading. I wish it expanded the story much further not necessarily through even more added scenes but just slower more patient pacing to give each emotional beat more space to land. The pace is so brisk so rushed when it didnt need to be. The movie had to deal with the runtime and budget constraints of its own medium but let the emotions feel alive because of its production and directing. This didnt and yet didnt take advantage of what it could have done. In a vacuum its still good. Maybe if you read the manga first youll still feel things. But youll probably feel less than you would if you watched the movie. Let that be your magical first experience. And after that why bother with this? Your Name had a much better manga adaptation while also not as good as its film it felt like its own take on its story. My favorite manga adaptation of a Shinkai work is She and Her Cat which feels like it could have been the original. But Weathering With Yous manga feels like it does not justify itself it need not have existed yet something much better than it could have.