The Garden of Words

This movie is technically brilliant.

It's colour pallet suits it's mood. It is animated immaculately. It is a marvel to watch. It has this natural element to its shorts and it has inserts of random elements of nature that just looks insanely good. It is so impressive.

It also has a very pretty score that works well with its subdued mood.

The story is where I start to find issue with the movie. It is such a short film and I think there is so much packed into it that it gets lost somewhat.

I don't love the romance of the story I honestly think it would have been better being about friendship and two lonely people finding a friend in each other. I think that would have been much more poignant. The romance added this uncomfortableness to it which sort of flattened the story.

The other issue is that the story is very unclear in areas. I think if the film was stretched out a little and had its run time at an hour rather than 45mins, it would have benefited tremendously. It would have had a little more time to flesh out the storylines. They all seemed crammed in and I got a bit lost.

I think this is an incredible movie and with tiny changes it would have been amazing.

I've seen most of Makoto Shinkai's anime. When I first saw 5cm per second, I was amazed at how well the emotions of the characters dwell in the environment around them.

Garden of words is no exception. The refined use of environment and ambient effects (sound, music, weather etc) contribute greatly to the film's story. There isn't much to say about how Makoto does it and if you're going to like the style but give it a watch and you'll know.

Overall, Garden of words is a really good piece of art. It's definitely filled with Makoto's signature style and a definite recommendation to watch.

I've always had mixed feelings about the works of Makoto Shinkai. Movies like 5 Centimeters per second are visually striking and evocative, but they are also essentially illustrated radio plays, where the story is told through words.

Garden of Words, surprisingly, is a movie that lets the images speak. While there's still a fair amount of narration, much of the story is told through its gorgeous visuals.

Thoughtful and touching, this movie proves I was right to keep watching Shinkai's films in spite of continual frustration and disappointment. I did it because I knew what he was trying for could work beautifully if he just learned to allow silence, and now he has. I hope this is a sign that he has matured into the animator I always hoped he'd be.

Promoted as a feature-length film, Shinkai Makoto's Garden of Words surprisingly only lasts 46 minutes. However, it was enough for the director to portray human emotions as well as understand the purpose of relationships.

The word "love" in modern Japanese is "ai", but in the ancient language, it was actually written as "koi", which is a compound of two other Kanji means "solitude" and "sad". Though Garden of Words is set in modern times, "love" in this film will be portrayed in its original meaning, which leads to a story about longing and loneliness, as well as suggesting an unhappy ending for love.

At the center, there is Takao, a 15-year-old student who wants to become a shoe-maker. On rainy days, he often plays truant in a Japanese-style garden and learns to make shoes there. By chance he meets Yukino, a mysterious woman much older than him, and whenever it rains, the two of them meet each other in the garden. Over time, their relationship deepens and the mystery surrounding Yukino finally reveals itself on a dry day.

Similar to Shnkai's previous films The Place Promised in Our Early Days, 5 Centimeters Per Second, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, the most impressive thing about Garden of Words are the vibrant & unique visual elements. In this latest film, he continues to develop his own unique style. Clean and cute, a little bit cheesy even, Shinkai uses excessive glare and light pink tones, and the result is a bombastic impressive 46- minute picture.

The park's natural setting, with green trees drooping into the water, the wind stirring the small rocks, creates a space ripe with romance and poetry, which helps ease anxiety. Although the scenes in the school, Yukino's house, train station etc were beautifully drawn, the brightest points in the painting of Garden of Words are the natural moments when two people sit in the park together and enjoy the stillness of emotion.

Garden of Words delivers a simple, soft love story, though many would argue that it is taboo. The director knows how to manipulate love, make it as natural as rain, by arranging the meeting at a far away location from where they work/study, only meeting on rainy days to make their feelings vibrate. Eventually, when the truth of their fate is revealed, the audience completely accepts it, because their love for each other is full of sincerity and cultivated diligently through the rainy days.

Garden of Words is a triumph of visual style over substance. It can be very predictable, can be very cheesy when two people are hugging and crying at the end. But the movie creates honest and fresh emotions, accompanied by an impressive visual expression. Garden of Words is not simply the binding of the last two people through some lines of Japanese poetry that they read to each other, It is also the shining of unique storytelling style with images.

And with the blink of an eye, a small gesture is enough to say everything about human emotion, words probably are not needed anymore. Garden of Words gives you a unique experience, exploring the visual and aesthetic language of love.

Trung Rwo

Although I don't make reviews of movies (only read and maybe comment with friends), Shinkai's movies just force me to. My first comment was of, in my opinion is this director's best work to this day, 5 cm per second, and so this is going to be my second comment.

With that long introduction said, I must say this movie surprised me, with a scenery a OST worthy of the highest regards (like Shinkai has us used to) and a character development spot on. Not the deepest analysis in each character (he couldn't do that in 45 min) but deep enough for the audience to understand them and know what they are going through which is the whole point of the movie. All this wrapped up with a spectacular climax. Although you feel the climax coming, you don't expect a climax like this, with that much energy, sentiment, and art, all in 2 min long.

To finish, a little opinion on Shinkai, I have seen all his movies and I sense that him, with this movie, just realized what are his strong points: not huge movies with 8 characters and lots of themes (a ground where Miyasaki flourishes) but little situations where few characters stand for being truly humane and how they confront problems that ,at that time, mean the world to them and shape them for the future. He's a director that likes to test new grounds (part coming from being a young) but he's also getting reaching his full potential. That's why "Voices from a distant star", "5 cm per second" and this movie are his best work to date and "Voices from deep below" and "place promised" being his not so good movies (although I liked them).