03.21
With two Makoto Shinkai works under my belt, I still wasn’t sure of the direction his movies were going. While both Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days leaned more towards romantic dramas in sci-fi settings, I remained skeptical as to how many different takes of the same theme Shinkai could pull off. Thankfully, 5 Centimeters per Second breaks the mold of the previous two movies, if only slightly.
While 5 Centimeters Per Second was released a mere three years after The Place Promised in Our Early Days, production values seem significantly greater than Shinkai’s previous works. Rather than giving a sci-fi twist as was the norm with his previous movies, 5cm is set firmly in the real world, and its beautiful animation clearly takes note of such. With details from panning scenes of cherry blossoms, to the old washed out look of train stations, the movie takes commonplace Japanese settings and animates them in such a way that if it weren’t for the character designs, you would think you were watching a live action movie. Such attention to detail was a nice touch and better sets the groundwork for the story to take place.
The film is divided into three acts, each focusing on the daily life of Takaki, a young boy we follow from childhood to early adulthood. Similar to Voices of a Distant Star, 5cm does an excellent job of making the viewers care for Takaki while also raising the tension between his possible love interest through their not seeing each other for extended periods of time. And while we never learn all that much about him as a person, the fact that we as an audience witness key moments throughout his life is enough to form an attachment to him.
Now, at the expense of breaking the semi-coherent flow of this post, I have to mention that reviewing this movie without giving any spoilers is difficult, but I’ll try to be as vague as possible.
5cm is one of those movies that acts more as an experience than a movie in the traditional sense. That’s not to say it’s disgustingly avant-garde. On the contrary, its very real portrayal of its characters and the lives they carry on with forms for more than I could ask for from a story. As you go from act to act, you realize that the movie as a whole can’t have an end because life is just one of those things that is constantly happening around us—if not one person’s, then another’s (again, I swear the movie isn’t as artsy-fartsy as I’m making it seem).
It’s in keeping that message along with its top-notch animation (even by today’s standards) that makes 5 Centimeters per Second an excellent movie, and my favorite of the Shinkai films I’ve seen.