Reviews

If I were, like Sei Shonagon, to compose a list of “Things that make the heart beat faster”, I would first and foremost place in that list “the sky between 6pm to 7pm when walking on the pathway away or back from home”. During that moment of the day, when the sun, just setting, causes the clouds to tint pink and the sky to become a sea of orange and red, only then can I understand the first prose poem of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen.

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,
Your mother, your sister, or your brother?
I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.
Your friends?
Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.
Your country?
I do not know in what latitude it lies.
Beauty?
I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.
Gold?
I hate it as you hate God.
Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
I love the clouds the clouds that pass up there
Up there the wonderful clouds!”

If I were, like Shonagon again, to compose a list of “Hateful things”, then I would first and foremost place “the sky lacking the romanticism of rain, sunsets, sunrises or cloudy days” when all the clouds look like bloated gaudy woolly sheep in a sea of disgustingly monotonous light blue.

If I were, then, asked the question: “Of all the various aspects and abilities of animation, what is the foremost and distinct aspect that encapsulates all of your love for this medium, all of its splendor, all of its divinity?” I would then direct such an inquisitive soul towards the tapestry of the sky and reply: “Its generosity towards the dreamer”.

For what does the dreamer think when he looks at the sky? He perceives Nature’s stinginess in feeding him beauty only in thimbles. He fills his heads with the most luxurious and brilliant of sunsets and then looks at his watch and realizes that it is hours till sunset and hours again to the sunrise. Furthermore the dreamer is swamped with such stifling modernity that all buildings and grand skyscrapers, all offices and hallways, have lost their sparkle (the sparkle of man and his ingenuity of creation).

Generosity, then, is to create a world where every cloud has its flair, every sky its virtue, and every building its sparkle. Generosity is to create a world where the sun is so finely directed that, rather than being an unbearable heat upon the idle walker, it makes everything alive in such viscous gleams that one cannot help but think this world was made of painted Venetian glass.

To dulled eyes Shinkai’s 5cm per second is a love story. To the dreamer it is a catalogue of dreams: most frequently dreams of the sky.