Review of 5 Centimeters Per Second / 秒速5センチメートル, directed by Makoto Shinkai

For those of you who have never set foot virtually into this space, welcome! This is my blog, which serves as an online diary and digital archive of everything I’ve watched, read, and experienced in the past few years. Recently, it has become a source of income for me, and a crux as I faced unexpected unemployment after an opportunity I was told I had fell through. Feel free to click around if you liked this post.

In addition to this become a vital income source while I’m unemployed, I’ve been actually catching up on my content game. There are so many movies, television shows, and books I’ve watched and read throughout the years but never had the chance to review, so while I’ve had the free time, I’m dedicating more time to catching up on these reviews.

So in today’s review, it’s been in line with something I’ve been trying to do in my life and on the blog. I want to diversify the kinds of content and entertainment I consume in my daily life. Not only do I want to see more global perspectives beyond my usual movies, but I also want to branch out into genres that I typically don’t watch.

I used to watch a ton of anime growing up, but I fell off in high school in favor of watching more real-life Asian dramas. Because I’m trying to watch different kinds of content, I opened up my Netflix one day and saw I was being suggested by the platform 5 Centimeters Per Second.

I hadn’t heard of the movie before, but I liked the synopsis and saw it was directed by Makoto Shinkai. So I pressed play!

Let’s get into the review. I don’t want to bore you in the introduction with semantics and too many context details of how we ended up here.

The story of one boy’s coming of age and the girls around him.

This is a movie set in several periods within one boy’s life. His name is Takaki Tono, and the film begins in 1991, in Japan, when Takaki meets a new girl named Akari. She just transferred to his elementary school, just like he did a year ago, and the two match in their interests.

They grow pretty close during their time in elementary school, but when it comes time to graduate, Akari moves with her family to another prefecture: Tochigi. The two kids write letters to each other, but as distance tends to do, they stop writing eventually. When Takaki’s parents decide to move in 1995, he wants to visit her.

He goes during a snowstorm and his train gets heavily delayed. This doesn’t stop him and he makes it all the way to her station, and she meets him there. They do end up kissing later on in the night, but Takaki realizes right after that it’s impossible for them to be together. After spending the night in a shed, the two depart at the train station and promise to write to each other again.

The first time jump then happens. We’re in 1999, and Takaki is a year away from graduating high school. We meet another one of his classmates Kanae, who is in love with him ever since she met him in middle school. It’s obvious she has a crush on him due to the sheer amount of time she tries to spend with him, but she does notice he’s always writing emails.

Turns out he’s never sending those emails and is dreaming of Akari. Kanae comes to terms with the fact that she will never be good enough for Takaki to love her, and she decides to do nothing about her crush even further. This segment of the movie ends with her crying herself to sleep after she comes to accept this fact, and we then move a decade into the future.

The year is 2008. Now an adult, Takaki is a programmer living and working in Tokyo with quite the successful career, while Akari is getting prepared to marry someone. Turns out Takaki still wants Akari in his life, but he has a girlfriend. That girlfriend calls him, he doesn’t answer, and that relationship comes to an end.

He then quits his stable job because of how he feels for Akari. Meanwhile with her, she finds her letters she wrote but never sent all those years ago. Both of them have a dream of meeting at Iwafune with the cherry blossoms, and when they are walking down a road they would go on as kids, they pass each other.

It seems they recognize each other at the train crossing, but then a train passes by as they look back. When Takaki looks as the train finishes passing by, Akari is gone. He smiles to himself, then continues walking forward.

Overall Thoughts

I had never heard of this movie before I watched it, despite it being a Makoto Shinkai film, and I liked it a lot! There’s a lot of poetry in movies like these, and the metaphor of the cherry blossom (something that represents youth and dies quickly) serves as something that’s very direct towards the plot.

That said, I didn’t care for the plot though. The magic in this movie for me was watching it all unfold and seeing how it came to life on the screen, and that’s what made it worth it. The whole unrequited love angle is something we’ve seen before a thousand times, so it’s that poetry that kept me going.

But I might be an odd one with this movie, that’s for sure. I think if you’re interested in the film and haven’t seen it already, you should definitely go watch it. I think it might be worth it for you if it’s something of interest!

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