5 Centimeters Per Second: DVD Review
Available through ADV Films

Good things come to those who wait. Unless you wait forever and all you’re left with is that irreparable gnawing, hollow regret for the rest of your life.

Released (at last) on DVD this week from ADV Films is 5 Centimeters per Second, the third film from anime director Makoto Shinkai. There’s little argument to be made that Shinkai has a talent for visuals. The backgrounds are so impossibly detailed that they border on photorealism at times, yet they exhibit such specific moods, colors and styles that highlight the necessity for such intricate renderings. The character design and animation is beautifully understated, serving only to compliment the story and the overall tone of the film.

The story, however, is another… uh… story. With this latest project, the science fiction elements from Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days have been excised completely, leaving an eerily undiluted contemporary setting. We meet Takaki and Akari as elementary school students, and follow them with brief and scattered glimpses of their everyday thoughts and actions into young adulthood, drifting from each other along the way. Presented in three chapters providing seemingly arbitrary segmentation, the audience watches as characters fight against the inevitable constraints and dissolution of friendships while life puts distances between them. That’s it. No one is forced to make the ultimate sacrifice, the perpetuation of the world isn’t threatened in any way and nobody who we thought was alive is revealed to have been a ghost all along.

Instead, Shinkai continues to champion the growing slice-of-life style of narrative in modern anime, challenging the limitations and stigma often attached to the medium as childish or overblown. He doesn’t show signs of relenting on his apparent fixation with the subtler shades of human emotion: Feelings that are born from brief moments of loss or melancholy, which build up to create the weight that people are forced to carry, heavier and heavier as they age. Where so many storytellers concern themselves with the melodrama of predictably life-altering events and crises, Shinkai acknowledges that every moment has an effect on our perspective on the world. Don’t be surprised to find your heart aching in sympathy for the characters and their inescapable circumstances as they shoulder the burdens that are born of simply living life. Then again, maybe you’ll be bored to tears even with the brief sixty-minute runtime and angry that such talent wasn’t better applied to a story featuring exploding ninja robot villages at war with armies of cat girls.

By Eugene Poon