Kotonoha no Niwa, or the Garden of Words (which is a cool title for me, by the way) started amazingly promising but unfortunately became a bit of disappointment in such mentioned concern.
Undeniably, one of the good points of the movie is how it presented a fresh and different perspective (at least, to me) on romance while maintaining the subtlety of classic straightforward romantic development. Two seemingly different people who got to know each other by staying in an unknown yet familiar place. What I really liked about it is that the romantic development of the two wasn't made "love at first sight" shabby kind of crap, yet not complicated or based on some conflict that they had to address just to make way for character development. The character development for the two was portrayed on a slice-of-life-ish way - moments when these two just talked their hearts out and enjoyed each other's company, which amazingly did its job well and to some extent, was even better than to have a concrete reason for the two to start getting along with each other. It even emphasized how much they are drawn to each other despite not knowing each other that much, and without being with each other for a long period of time - those casual hours of nothing but leisure, by making them detailed and finely portrayed, intensified the realization of one's feelings for each other, and generally just made their relationship personally subtle and enjoyable to watch. What also was very, very commendable (albeit expected coming from my point of view) is the animation. It's just literally breathtaking and the detailed scenery, even simple plot details like raindrops or the trees or the large crowd of the busy city proper was ultimately beautiful. I've had so much enjoyment just watching the two main characters stand out from the beauty in the background. The timid, calm mood of the environment fitted well with the mood of the characters, as well as the story. Overall, the serious tone of the story coupled with good romance and breathtaking animation contributed much to my overall enjoyment of the movie.
While these points were surely commendable and praiseworthy, I felt that the movie did not really exceed my expectations primarily because of what I mentioned earlier. The movie, was very promising in terms of hinting what the story would be all about as it raised some very interesting points to consider, "why was it made that way?" I anticipated so much in the "big revelation" but didn't really sustain the generated interest in me. What made me anticipate that much is that the plot details didn't seem to connect or jive at any logical angle at the superficial level. Now if I felt that it was absolutely just to trivialize the details of the plot, like they were making those stuff just to create an actual plot I'd be pretty sure it wouldn't spark my interest. But in this movie, I had my eyes ogled at the screen for the entire anime because of number one, the mood it sets was very serious and realistic and somewhat reflective that it wouldn't feel being trivialized, and secondly the portrayal of seemingly trivial moments created a very significant impact to the characters. At that, I expected that the anime would successfully convey to me the overall message and story line that would eventually be revealed when the resolutions come to play. While at some aspects the anime was ultimately successful, I felt that at some plot details there was no actual significance for pointing them out, like what the anime justified is how further events happened with that plot detail as a form of justification, rather than retrospectively justifying the plot detail's existence because the plot necessitates that the plot detail should be the case. One example (this is in the synopsis and therefore not a spoiler) is when the anime made Akizuki a shoemaker and justified that the events that would follow would be because he is a shoemaker, but did not justify him being a shoemaker because the plot needed him to be one. Thus, it can be said that Akizuki can actually be portrayed with another aspiration/job without really compromising the overall story line, and therefore can be said to be a bit trivialized. What I felt, from the overall appeal of the film, was that there existed several random details and connected them with a probability-type of plot construction, like these random events connected by chance, and there was no real overarching story connecting such details. I'm not saying that there was no justification for every single plot detail; in fact, some details that were justified later in the story were absolutely amazing, it's just that many promising plot details were left out and could have been utilized to create a single great story connecting those things. That's why I rated it as good - it was amazingly breathtaking at many points, but still had pointers to work on, especially with plot construction.
Beautiful yet bittersweet, Promising yet disappointing. That's Kotonoha no Niwa for you.
