Note: major spoilers for 5 cm/s, Minor spoilers for The Garden of Words and Your Name.

Shinkai’s Rise

LISTEN

Makoto Shinkai is a name you might have heard mentioned here or there, and for good reason. His most recent film, Your Name, has taken the film community by storm, most notably for its amazing visuals and beautiful music. Your Name follows a trend of just pure beauty that Shinkai has put out throughout the years. Here’s an example of how Shinkai elevates fiction over reality, from his 2013 film, The Garden of Words.

Yeah. When I first saw this album of pictures posted by zixyon on imgur, I could barely differentiate the anime world and the real world.

Shinkai’s films all contain or are focused around romance, and it’s fitting that he uses such breathtaking visuals to accompany a romantic theme. His goal in every movie is to explore the emotional connections that humans build with each other and scenarios that can change how we feel. He also heavily uses the idea of distance between people, whether physical or emotional. As I said with Satoshi Kon’s movies, one really just needs to watch one of his movies to get the full experience. Where Kon uses bombastic imagery and surreal plots, Shinkai uses subtle characterization and quiet human interaction. Scenes are often without dialogue, just body language and beautiful backgrounds.

More than anything however, Shinkai’s art creates awe. His long-panning shots over pastoral landscapes and shots of rainy cities are orgasms to the eyes.

Here are some examples:

There’s a reason why Shinkai’s 2011 film 5 Centimeters per Second has been widely considered as 5 Wallpapers per Second instead. The sad song is even more powerful if you consider that the real life singer wrote it for his dead girlfriend.

(skip to 10:00 for the scene if timestamp doesn’t work)

This montage scene from The Garden of Words is absolutely breathtaking and it tells so much about the characters with so few words.

Emotion of Color

LISTEN

Color in any form of media greatly changes how we perceive the emotions of the story. Here, we can see a shot that Shinkai essentially reused, except with a completely different color palette that corresponds with the themes of the anime.

Train in The Garden of Words

Train in Your Name

The tone of The Garden of Words is far more down to earth and subtle, with the focus on a schoolboy and a woman that skip school and work on rainy mornings together, both of whom have no idea of direction for their lives. It revolves about how they struggle to find themselves and thus the colors are more muted and earthy.

By contrast, the plot of Your Name is far more surreal, with a boy and a girl swapping bodies in their dreams, lends itself to a far more dreamy color palette. Shinkai portrays the magical realism setting perfectly with a blurred vignette and brightened colors.

In general, Shinkai’s color usage is visceral in evoking the emotion of the characters and the mood of the movie.

Shot Composition:

LISTEN

Every director uses shot composition in order to help the movie flow better for the viewers, and Shinkai also uses his shot composition to add on to the themes of his story. In 5 cm/s, the main character, Takaki, is stuck in life, forever in love with a girl that he was in a relationship in that moved away. He’s constantly thinking about her – every day, every night- which leads to the deterioration of his relationships (He shrugs off a girl, Kanae’s affection because he’s always thinking about Akari, the girl who moved) and eventually his spiral into depression at the end of the movie. It’s a movie with a lot more substance than I can just describe with one short analysis, but I wanted to impress you with how much thought Shinkai puts into his direction. From /u/nap682 on Reddit,

“The quadrant system I talked about shows Balance on screen in Act 1, the characters usually are equally on the right side of the screen and the left, and they move left and right equally. However, as the film goes on, Takaki shows up more and more on the right side of the screen, looking left. Now think of the movie like a book. since it’s Japanese, the story moves right to left. Takaki frequently is on the right side of the screen, looking left but rarely actually moving in that direction. He’s always looking for Akari in his future but she simply isn’t going to be there. An aspect that he refuses to accept so he remain stagnant on the right side of the screen. As comparison, Kanae has a similar issue but after she has her talk with Takaki about “only doing what you can”, her next scene is her running off screen to the left, moving on into her future. It actually isn’t even until the last scene of the movie in which Takaki moves off screen to the left, the railroad crossing, and that scene is very interesting in and of itself. Akari may or may not actually be there, but the important part to recognize is that Takaki turns backwards to the right to try and see her. He’s looking into the past. It is almost like the final trial of if he will move on with his life or run back into his past to search for Akari once again. But he no longer chases after her. He shows a bittersweet smile of accepting that the past is the past and he must continue on into the future, turns, and walks off stage left. And thus the movie ends with a somber piano. Now the piece itself might seem just plain sad but it has a minor pick up in pace periodically that I mark as those moments where, even though life is sad, you hold onto a happy thought long enough to push you through to the next chapter of your life.

I hope that you have been incentivized to watch some scenery porn, and encourage you to look for these kinds of directional tools in other media forms. It’s pretty cool.

References/Learn More:

Garden of Words pictures: https://imgur.com/gallery/VoxHX

Analysis of Your Name OP: https://youtu.be/oikCyrqFLso

Quadrant System:  https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/33dqx9/wt_5_centimeters_per_second_a_story_of_longing/?st=j842eaoj&sh=6e634e37

Or just watch the damn movies.