5 centimeters per second (makoto shinkai, 2007)

This is the twenty-first film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2022-23", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 8th annual challenge, and my fourth time participating (my first year can be found at "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-20", the second year at "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2020-21", and last year at "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2021-22"). Week 21 is called "Advanced Anime Week":

This week's challenge is to watch a previously unseen film from Owen Shapiro's Advanced Anime list.

This was a challenge, all right. First off, Shapiro's list disappeared, making it hard to complete the actual challenge. The list had been replicated by others, though, so it looked good, until I found that almost every film on the list was unavailable to me. I decided to pick something that 1) I could access and 2) was at least nominally anime, if not "advanced". And thus, 5 Centimeters per Second.

The film is quite subtle. It follows the story of young Takaki Tōno, and contains three episodes from different points in Takaki's life. In the first, he meets a girl, Akari, in elementary school, and they have a deep friendship that fades somewhat when Akari moves away. In the second, Takaki is in high school, and a classmate, Kanae, is in love with him. But she can never express her true feelings to Takaki. Finally, in the third, Takaki is grown and a programmer, still thinking of Akari. They seem to meet on a road, but a passing train comes between them and they don't end up contacting each other.

There is a bittersweet feel to it all. Relationships are intense, but they don't last, and lives move on. The movie is gorgeous, even when the tale is melancholic. But, to be honest, I found it all a bit boring, even with its short 62-minute running time. It's a typical movie for the challenge, something I wouldn't have seen on my own, but ultimately far enough outside of my taste preferences that I appreciated it without loving it.