Makoto Shinkai’s,
5 Centimeters per Second, which screened this weekend during the
New York International Children’s Film Festival,
is a chain of short stories following the three loves of Takaki Tono.
There’s 13-year-old Akari, who braves a hopeless train ride in a
blizzard just to see him one last time, high school classmate, Kanae
whose connection to him is so strong, it slowly chips away at her
emotional stability and Risa, a nebbish office worker who, three years
after their break-up, still sends him text messages declaring her
unshakable devotion.
Instead of harnessing this power and using it to talk vulnerable young
women out of their panties, Takaki becomes increasingly introspective.
He is a distant, solitary figure whose head is either hanging down in
sorrow or pointed skyward for long periods of oblivious star-gazing.
It’s essentially a film about unrequited love and the endless
possibilities of youth, but considering it’s subtitled and done almost
entirely in inner monologues, it’s a rather amusing choice for a
children’s film festival. About 40 minutes in, when it became obvious
that there would be no juvenile hi jinks, one kid turned to his mother
to ask “Is this
Mulan?”
I regularly surveyed the theater to see how the rest of the audience,
half children with their parents and half 14-year-old girls, was
holding up...
Read full "5 Centimeters" here.[ read more... ]
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