Movie Review: 5 Centimeters Per Second - a chain of short stories about their distance
I decided it'd be worthwhile to take a break today from study and pick it up tomorrow, so I watched the first movie I found on animecrazy.net. Turned out to be 5 Centimeters Per Second, which is a movie I had heard about briefly. It's by Shinkai Makoto, who directed The Place Promised in Our Early Days, which I've seen in stores.
The story is split into three episodes. The first tells of the childhood romance a boy called Takaki and a girl called Akari had. But when Akari's parents move away from Tokyo, they spend a year writing letters to each other before Takaki takes a series of trains to meet her. But because of the snow, the trains are delayed and he doesn't end up meeting her until 4 hours after the promised time. Nevertheless, they kiss under the sakura tree and spend the night sleeping side by side in a shack (they're 13, nothing icky will happen)
The second episode takes place when Takaki is in high school. A girl called Kanae likes him for his kindness, but his longing for Akari makes him grow distant. He starts to have dreams where he is standing with a girl looking over at a planet moving. Finally he realises this girl is Akari. The day Kanae decides to confess she likes him is the day where she realises that he never really looked at her as anything more than a friend and he has big hopes and dreams, and so she gives up.
The last episode takes place in 2008, when everyone has already grown up. Akari is engaged to someone, and Takaki is still thinking about her and dreaming about her. One night, provoked by finding the letter she wanted to give Takaki 10 years ago, Akari has the same dream as Takaki, of when he came to see her that snowy night. When Akari goes to Tokyo to presumably visit her fiance, she walks past Takaki just as the barriers for the train lower. Takaki notices this and waits for the trains to pass to see if it was her, but when the trains go, the woman had left. He smiles and walks away.
I won't say I cried, because I didn't. But it was sad. One part of me really sympathised with Takaki, but probably the reason why I didn't cry was because the other part of me wanted to slap him and say 'it's been 10 years, honey, move on.' Thing is, though, that was the point of the story; the fact that this man could not move on and that made him an emotionally cold person. I don't think Kanae moved on either, which is really sad because if he had actually looked at her and realised she liked him, maybe the two of them would have been happy =(
The art was amazing. Seriously. It was beautiful and had heaps of detail. And... that's all I have to say on that front.
I really can't think of any downsides to it other than 'it wasn't happy,' which is to be expected since it's not a happy story.
I reckon an 8/10 and chocolate cake.
The story is split into three episodes. The first tells of the childhood romance a boy called Takaki and a girl called Akari had. But when Akari's parents move away from Tokyo, they spend a year writing letters to each other before Takaki takes a series of trains to meet her. But because of the snow, the trains are delayed and he doesn't end up meeting her until 4 hours after the promised time. Nevertheless, they kiss under the sakura tree and spend the night sleeping side by side in a shack (they're 13, nothing icky will happen)
The second episode takes place when Takaki is in high school. A girl called Kanae likes him for his kindness, but his longing for Akari makes him grow distant. He starts to have dreams where he is standing with a girl looking over at a planet moving. Finally he realises this girl is Akari. The day Kanae decides to confess she likes him is the day where she realises that he never really looked at her as anything more than a friend and he has big hopes and dreams, and so she gives up.
The last episode takes place in 2008, when everyone has already grown up. Akari is engaged to someone, and Takaki is still thinking about her and dreaming about her. One night, provoked by finding the letter she wanted to give Takaki 10 years ago, Akari has the same dream as Takaki, of when he came to see her that snowy night. When Akari goes to Tokyo to presumably visit her fiance, she walks past Takaki just as the barriers for the train lower. Takaki notices this and waits for the trains to pass to see if it was her, but when the trains go, the woman had left. He smiles and walks away.
I won't say I cried, because I didn't. But it was sad. One part of me really sympathised with Takaki, but probably the reason why I didn't cry was because the other part of me wanted to slap him and say 'it's been 10 years, honey, move on.' Thing is, though, that was the point of the story; the fact that this man could not move on and that made him an emotionally cold person. I don't think Kanae moved on either, which is really sad because if he had actually looked at her and realised she liked him, maybe the two of them would have been happy =(
The art was amazing. Seriously. It was beautiful and had heaps of detail. And... that's all I have to say on that front.
I really can't think of any downsides to it other than 'it wasn't happy,' which is to be expected since it's not a happy story.
I reckon an 8/10 and chocolate cake.