5 Centimetres Per Second (Byousoku 5cm)

Reviewed by: Marty

Director: Makoto Shinkai

Screenplay: Makoto Shinkai

Cast: Kenji Mizuhashi, Yoshimi Kondou, Satomi Hanamura

Music: Tenmon

If anyone is aware of ‘socially awkward penguin’ pictures – well, I’ll just assume no one reading this is, so I’ll explain them anyway. Basically it has a small picture of a penguin on a blue background with a sentence divided into two halves that describes an awkward situation nearly all of us are frighteningly familiar with. For example: “SEE PEOPLE YOU KNOW ON THE BUS – PRETEND TO NOT SEE BY THEM AND LOOK OUT THE WINDOW”. The genius behind them is that they’re often about stuff you don’t want to talk about or admit in real life – hence, pure awkwardness, and thus the nearly always negative connotations they arouse in your soul. There are hundreds of different ones, for all the different haunts of life, but the one I want to raise goes like this: “TELL EVERYONE YOU ARE AN ADULT – STILL WATCH ANIME”. How can I begin to process this? Initially it gave me the standard ‘socially awkward penguin’ feeling of, “oh, fuck, that’s me. how depressing”. However I’m not one to be put down by the internet, so I’m going to say this: the fact that many, basically a majority, think that if you watch cartoons or anime (the distinction people in general have between these two mediums also frustrates the hell out of me, but that’s another story) after you have ‘grown up’, you’re either a) weird, b) SOCIALLY AWKWARD or c) a nerd. So I will ask this: how can we reverse this perception? Miyazaki films, I think, help. However as anime can be generally categorised (ever so generally) as TV shows made up of giant robots, outlandish hair, big eyes, annoying voice acting, absurd high school antics and oversized breasts, I wonder if more ‘realistic’ anime can’t help the situation a little bit. This is where, for me, 5 Centimetres Per Second comes in.

5 Centimetres is split into three unevenly lengthened ‘acts’, following a male named Takaki Tono through three different stages of his life. In the first act, and probably the most lengthy, we learn that Takaki and a girl named Akari Shinohara, in their early teens at a school in the Tokyo area, have a tender, deeply mutual and wordless affection for one another. That’s really all there is to it, the heart of this film, and this is basically established simply by showing short vignettes of the two experiencing and enjoying everyday occurrences: watching the cherry blossoms falling (at 5 centimetres per second), talking in a cafe, reading in the library, catching the train. One day, Akari is forced to move away from Tokyo with her family, to a different province numerous train stops away. Unable to bear the distance between them, and unsatisfied by only writing each other constantly, Takaki prepares a trip out to the town where Akari eagerly awaits, but is burdened by several delays on his journey that gradually eat away at his emotional stability. In the second act, Takaki is older and no closer to Akari, and is attending a middle school away from Tokyo. He becomes an object of obsession for Kanae Sumida, a relatively grounded but shy and insecure girl who is into surfing. The act is seen from her point of view as she vies for Takaki’s affections, providing a great contrast to the previous act. The third act, by far the shortest, is an epilogue featuring Takaki’s young adult life, and shows his constant state of introspection and reflection as to how he fits into his life.

First and foremost, it must be mentioned: this movie is drop-dead gorgeous. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen; stunning, visually arresting, epic and so on so forth. It is hard to say anything else when you first see anything to do with this film, and I actually feel tripidation talking about the movie this way, because as we all know, a lot of things LOOK good, but often these things lack substance or anything that equals the achievement it gets by looking good. I am aware that a lot of acclaim this movie gets is for its animation and the design, rather than its screenplay or acting or whatever, and I’m okay with that, because I feel the plot/screenplay compliments its visuals, and vice versa.

The script is wonderfully sparse, yet at the same time it’s not. Heavily reliant on narration, the dialogue SOMETIMES gets a little too ‘obvious’ or over-emotional or angsty, and I do admit in some cases I wished less words had been said and more faith had been put into the audience’s interpretation. HOWEVER, there is still so much space, and the whole film has a lilting, meditative quality about it, not unlike wind blowing through grass. Those of Shinkai’s films I have seen, Voices of a Distant Star and The Places Promised in Our Early Days, seemed to suffer the same sort of ‘obvious’ and over-emotional dialogue lines (the films were overtly beautiful though), and it’s good to know that he’s come out with something a little more mature. Also, this is Shinkai’s first film that has almost no sci-fi setting – I say *almost* because there’s a pivotal scene involving a space shuttle being fired into the sky NASA-style, and a huge emphasis on watching it fly towards space. There’s nothing wrong with this – I love space – but it just might have been nice for there to be a Shinkai film that didn’t involve spaceships as important plot points, and have it kept a little closer to the ground realism-wise.

For me, the music caused my rating for this movie to slip away from the coveted 5-star. Tenmon I have never really found inspiring or terribly moving, but his music – even his name – is synonymous with Shinkai’s films, so there’s nothing that can be done about it. As a piano player I have my reasons: Tenmon’s touch on the piano can be a little bit too temperamental – although the sound is a lot better compared to the soundtrack to Shinkai’s earlier stuff – and the compositions are just pretty boring, using the same progressions, voicings and predictable harmony. Predictable harmony I have no problem with if the other two points can be improved. I’m being really elitist here, but sometimes when I heard his music put to some of the more romantic scenes in the movie I just felt ill. Also, there is a music video-esque reflection towards the end of the film put to a very, very bad pop song. I’m all for J-pop, but this song I fast fowarded most of, it was so bad. I’m so sorry for being so elitist like this.

The issue of the music aside, though, this film for me is like an amazing mixture of sound and visuals. It’s always a pleasure for me to hear Japanese people talk, and particularly in this film, the voice actors let their words flow over the film like water (whatever you do, DO NOT watch this film with the English dub). There’s all the standard melancholy you’d expect, but it’s very very beautiful, and full of truth. That’s the thing, I want to recommend this film to a lot of people, but…yes, it’s Japanese anime, yes, it’s got aspects of a stereotypical anime romantic storyline and a lot of the sappy bits that usually come with it; however that doesn’t mean it’s not truthful. As young teenagers, we feel our emotions ten-fold – especially love – because it’s our first real experiences with it. As we age, we learn to accept the distances that are created between ourselves, against our will or otherwise. For me, even if a lot of it’s below the surface (though that is my favourite place for these things in a film), this piece of art tells truths about love and affection, obsession, loss, time and – like basically everything I guess – the nature of humans. The subtitle to the film is “A Chain of Short Stories About Their Distance”, and it’s a great way to put it. Take the 63 minutes out to watch it, let it flow over you. Especially if you feel like giving anime a chance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxKn5AwOTis – a short trailer, fairly accurate preview of the film’s tone. The whole film IS on youtube, but because a lot of the film’s grandeur is its visuals, again I might have to recommend against that option…

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