I wish the substance could match the visuals but it's not even close, I know style itself can become the substance but it's just not the case here. In Byousoku 5 Centimeter, you're constantly bombarded with beautiful landscapes and scenery but you get nothing when it comes to actual content or anything else.
The story is shallow, you'll get practically noting when it comes to that, it's so shallow that I wonder if this anime is even spoilable. Without getting into too much detail the story is all about the life of someone who hasn't gone over something that happened a long time ago and that's it you won't get much more than that.
Characters:
lul You thought this anime had enough substance to build even a single character's character?
Significant dialogues, time to build characters relationships or a character's personality is almost non existent. You won't know anything about the characters, you'll just get to learn how the main character feels about that one girl and you'll get to see them in their feelings, in somekind of heavenly looking scenery ofc.
This anime will just give you cool scenery, a slow paced representation of characters feelings as time passes and it'll be over, characters you might not even give a fk about because you won't get to learn much about them or see them involved in an evenful story, in interesting dialogues or anything
This might make it seem like the anime is bad but I'm just covering what I didn't like about it, to me it's a 6/10 for fair/above average, giving it more than that just doesn't feel right. Even though it is great, I can't give this a 7+/10 just based on the animes atmosphere and visuals,
TLDR: Overrated, Makoto Shinkai was again too busy working on random aesthetic camera angles to put much thought into story or character depth
