A review of 5 Centimeters Per Second
Despite often feeling thin and disconnected, Writer/Director Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters Per Second nonetheless wields it beauty and heart in service of a stirring and gut-wrenching story.
Through three episodes following Takaki Tono at different stages of his life, this film follows a pure, idealized young romance as the protagonist and his childhood friend Akari Shinohara drift apart. Its vignettes are low on characterization, its character design and animation feel fairly basic, and the sense of continuity between the three stories is relatively weak. So the reason I feel compelled to write about this movie at all is a simple question — why, three days later, can I not get this movie out of my head, or the lump out of my throat?
The first thing that needs to be said about what ultimately makes 5 Centimeters Per Second succeed as a film is that it is persistently, astonishingly breathtaking. Starting with the nearly solo produced Voices of A Distance Star or even the laptop-made short She and her Cat, Makoto Shinkai has probably been most well known for his background art. Even in Shinkai’s first feature, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, which has surprisingly short credits for a 90-minute feature, is positively saturated with highly detailed and striking images. Compared even to his other films, though, the art is absolutely essential to the success of 5 Centimeters Per Second and is appropriately prominent, with the characters small or absent in many of the films most iconic frames.
5 Centimeters Per Second is unique among Shinkai’s early films for its complete lack of any supernatural or science fiction elements. In fact, the core selling point of its plot is how positively mundane it ultimately is — the budding romance isn’t thwarted by the grand design of a scientist or the designs of a quasi-religious supernatural force or the vast expanse of space, but rather pedestrian strokes of bad luck and perhaps a few missed opportunities. With fairly unmemorable characters and a straightforward core plot (aside from a few genuinely well-constructed scenes with little moments of dialogue and well executed symbolism), most of the weight of the film falls on the art, and the art carries it.
The beauty of this young love and the sense of loss that pervades the film as it goes on are conveyed mostly through the vast scale and grandiosity of the environments, which contrast with the smallness and transience of the characters and their woes. In one sequence, we see our main characters Takaki and Akari in a dream together on the surface of a nameless alien world. The color and the lighting, especially the sun and stars in the alien sky, are hyper-real, intense, and arguably overdone — the art feels busy, and, perhaps, all a bit too much. Indeed, I wouldn’t want just any movie to look like this just for the sake of it; even this film, if it had a more typical feature run time, might feel over saturated to the point that the impact is diminished. Over sixty minutes, though, it transcends. The dream world Takaki and Akari visit is astonishing and wondrous, but a little cold, a little empty, and a little too good to be true. And that all-encompassing bittersweetness holds in this viewer’s mind, leaving a strong enough impression to pervade the whole film.
It wouldn’t be right to say that the beauty of 5 Centimeters Per Second completely makes up for its weaknesses. I’ll confess that I had to check Wikipedia to recall the names of the main characters, which is rarely a good sign. It isn’t surprising to me that many viewers seem to have found the story hard to connect with and find the tragedy of the story to feel a little silly, to have a hard time feeling a strong sense of stakes. To my mind, Shinkai really only truly hit his stride as a storyteller with The Garden of Words, a film whose characters have much clearer motivations and struggles, though many would of course say his seminal breakout success your name. is the moment he figured out how to develop characters and pacing to match the quality of his artwork. Still, 5 Centimeters Per Second outshines its very real flaws, really capturing the essence of the axiom that “it’s more important for a film to be interesting than to be good.” (though more precisely in this case, “more important to be interesting than perfectly executed.”)
So while 5 Centimeters per Second might not be a truly great film, and not one that will reach every person who watches it, it is nonetheless a special and memorable experience — one that forecasted a special career that has only grown since. I only hope that Shinkai’s future work has the same kind of ambition towards nuance, poetry, and melancholy that 5 Centimeters has.
