Imagine the world’s most beautiful person. We take an X-ray of that person. You see his/her spine. And that’s it, no other bones. That is a Makoto Shinkai film.
Every story has a skeletal structure, a beginning, middle, and end. We all know this. Makoto Shinkai films also have a structure to their story. Just that they’re all the same.
Beginning: I love you.
Middle: I can’t stay with you forever.
End: I hope we see each other again.
You may be asking: With such a basic structure, how can any of his films be so successful? It’s all about the flesh. You don’t see someone’s skeleton, but if you actually try and think about the story, you really can see this structure. Criticisms aside, however, there is another thing that always happens in Shinkai films: Frickin’ incredible artwork. This show was no exception when it came to beautifully detailed backgrounds, natural scenes, and characters.
Of course, the soundtrack was also nice, performed by Radwimps. Personally, watching it in the theatre was a bit overwhelming, but the songs were great individually, and I thought that most of them played their role as part of the film.
These two factors (artwork and soundtrack) really cover up the basic story, and make it a beautiful film to sit and watch. But nothing more than that. It’s just eye candy. The rating 10 means masterpiece. A masterpiece has a well thought out story, and highly developed characters to execute it (at the very least, this would be a standard way of forming a masterpiece, there can be exceptions through extraordinary uniqueness, etc…).
—which now takes us to characters.We have the two main characters, Mitsuha and Taki. First spoiler incoming (not too much of a spoiler but…): in the story, Mitsuha and Taki switch bodies while they dream. Second spoiler: They end up falling in love. Okay, so they know each other because the switch bodies, but they never switch characters, they always remain themselves, just with a different body. In other words, they’re falling in love with someone who’s personality they actually know nothing about—I think that tells you enough about the depth of these characters (笑). But jokes aside, if I were to give you a description of these two, I would ask you to imagine incredibly normal high schoolers (the girl being a bit cute, and the guy being a bit handsome), and give them a super effective love potion that makes them want to see each other no matter what. That’s about the level of development we see.
Despite all said, Shinkai films never fail to at least seem heartfelt to me. It may be that since the structure of his stories are so simple, they feel relatable at the same time, and extremely real. I’d be pretty reluctant to give this film a masterpiece rating, but it does what Shinkai does best, which is more than enough for me to have thoroughly enjoyed the film.
