Kotonoha no Niwa

I don't think I've ever seen a movie animated quite this beautifully before; and that's saying something.

I love Makoto Shinkai. I really do. His works are always flat out gorgeous in terms of animation and sentimentality, and it's almost impossible for me to watch one of his films without feeling completely overwhelmed by the utterly human emotion of it all. There's just something very real about his work, very reflective on what it's like to be human, what it's like to feel things and not being able to really come to terms with that. Even his least appreciated film (and most Ghibli of them all), Children Who Chase Lost Voices, struck me very powerfully and as very stark when I first watched it. And really, Shinkai is all about details. He's about the beauty of the human experience, about the importance of an emotion or thought, about the beauty in the world around us, whether that's in a piece of breathtakingly animated chalk or the motion of rain.

But as beautiful as his films are, I always feel somewhat empty when I finish one, though not necessarily as a negative reaction. While Shinkai's attention to detail is very beautiful, I suppose once in a while it falls a bit into the dull, and occasionally when I watch his films I start finding it hard to really stay focused on the people beyond their overbearingly powerful emotions. That realism about his characters and their situations can make it a bit difficult to watch an entire film on them; they are too real, too touching, and it's almost painful (if not outright so) to see those emotions portrayed so lovingly and so matter-of-factly on screen. So much of the works are always spent in reflection, so when the film is over, trying to wrap your head around the question "what was this movie about?" is much tougher than it would be with a director like Hosada Mamoru or Hayao Miyazaki.

So I can understand both sides of the conversation around Shinkai. I can see the unmatched beauty that his films present, and the gorgeous, profound depth of his characters. I can understand the themes he's praised for, and the stark realism his endings often present us with. But I can also see why some don't elevate him to the level of Miyazaki, or otherwise call his work boring or unfulfilling. Even so, I still love his films, and I think Kotonoha no Niwa is among the best I've ever seen, Shinkai or otherwise. You don't need an epic journey or even a grand exploration of self to tell a wonderful story, and every moment of Garden of Words is really as beautiful and profound as the simple beauty we find in falling rain, especially rain animated this gorgeously.

Akizuki Takao (Miyu Irino) and Yukino Yukari (Hanazawa Kana) are a mismatched pair; one a young boy with an old-fashioned way of thinking and a strange goal, to become a shoemaker, and the other a depressed adult woman with little in the way of dreams or happiness. The two of them complete each other in the simplicity of their accidental meeting and subsequent friendship, and they find what they're looking for in that which seems so mysterious about the other. For Takao, Yukino is the very "secret" of adulthood, that mysterious place he feels he belongs in more than his "childish realities" on the days when it doesn't rain. She allures him the way his love of shoes does, appeals to that old-fashioned and adult taste of his that causes him to feel lonely in the everyday world. Rainy days for him are days when he gets to escape that loneliness and be with this woman, to reach into that untouchable world more clearly than ever.

Nothing, however, is ever as simple as it looks from an outside perspective. Yukino is hardly as mysterious as Takao believes her to be, and her seeming eccentricity stems from her own sense of feeling lost in the world. She's an adult but feels as helpless as a child, and notes that she's no more knowledgeable or intelligent as she was at Takao's age. She, like he, doesn't fit in, but unlike her much more impressionable counterpart, Yukino has lost her hopes and dreams. Takao comes into the relationship hoping; she comes into it despairing. It's for this reason that the catharsis at the end is so powerful; though Takao does the talking and Yukino leaves as promised, she finally understands what it is she wants and regains some of that hope he already possessed so much of. The moment of finally reaching out to him and talking to him about her pain is what saves her, and it makes Takao's final words about walking forward all the much more poignant for it.

N.B.: Thanks to Ivan for the gorgeous caps!