The plot has problems. Student-teacher relationships are a cringeworthy anime cliche best avoided these days. The origin of the protagonist Takao's interest in shoemaking is given heavy-handed symbolism as connected to his mother (why can't he just be obsessed with shoes? why does everyone's life-purpose have to have some deep meaning or memory to it?). Yukari is a very weak heroine who runs from school to hide out in the park and has as little purpose as Takao has much purpose, and in some respects seems parasitic or selfish; I waffled on whether she is a good character and eventually came down on the side of yes. The final resolution was a pleasant surprise: rather than take the Hollywood ending, Shinkai went for a more realistic one, where the relationship fails in the immature puppy love sense, but succeeds in perhaps spurring personal growth. Thank goodness! That's a much better ending than what often happens in the setup...
(I was amused to read ANN's interview with Shinkai http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interview/2013-05-01/makoto-shinkai-the-garden-of-words-interview and see "when I first showed my original plan of the story to the other workers they mentioned that the main female character Yuki seemed rather selfish, which I didn't really intend."
As usual with Shinkai, most of the praise is for the animation and visual design. In GoW, the approach is so realistic, and is about such an ordinary situation devoid of SF, I found myself wondering why bother making it anime at all? All of it could've been done as live-action (I'd guess that a live version would both have a larger audience and have been much cheaper to make). A little further in, it occurred to me that there is an excellent reason to do it as animation: much of the movie is set in the lush green garden while it is raining. I personally enjoy going to gardens and green spaces when it is raining in the summer to, and the reason is that when you go during the day and it's raining and you're in the right place, not only does it smell nice and the rain makes soothing noises and you feel safely isolated, but the greenery simply 'pops' in a hard to describ way and all the grass and branches look unusually vivid and alive. It's impossible to catch with photographs (at least, with my crummy cameras), and I wonder if it's possible for even professionals to film it (timing alone would make it hard), but Shinkai is able to arrange the animation to exaggerate the colors and lighting and in general be hyperrealistic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperrealism_%28visual_arts%29). I have to say, in previous Shinkai works, I found the hyperrealism maybe a bit of a turnoff since it seemed to be there largely to show off and impress and distract from story and characters that maybe couldn't really bear too much scrutiny, but in GoW, the hyperrealism seems perfectly justified, as if Shinkai is saying: "*this* is what these gardens really look like in rain, let me impress it on you with enough vividness to compensate for the screen's weaknesses".
