The Garden of Words is the most aesthetically beautiful anime I've ever seen. The combination of minute detail and the modelling of reflected and refracted light in sun and rain creates something which has beauty in every frame, which makes you constantly pause it to appreciate frames as still images.
Much as its visual beauty comes from a careful, slightly glossy depiction of the real world, the film seems to have aimed to bring out the same poetry-of-the-ordinary concept in its story and its characters. Two lonely, somewhat lost and unsure people meet coincidentally because they both like to skive off their responsibilities when it rains in the mornings and go to watch the rain and light play on a garden pond. Slowly, they begin to understand a little more about each other and connect, opening up to each other as they don't to anyone else.
The main character, Takao, is a high school student in (more or less) modern Japan who wants to be a shoemaker, the sort of quirky ambition which combines nostalgic outdatedness with a half-artistic/half-blue-collar feel. His chosen profession figures into the film in a couple of significant ways - since it's more than a little odd, it leaves him feeling lonely and alienated because he feels people would laugh at his dream, and it becomes a metaphor for the way he helps Yukino, the mysterious and secretly-traumatised older woman he meets, to "walk", to stand up for herself and engage with life again.
This is a sufficiently promising premise to become something special if put in the hands of a keen observer of human connections - someone who can realistically write the conversations a 15-year-old and a 27-year-old might have in the context, and find the spark for their growing relationship. The problem is, Shinkai isn't all that keen an observer, preferring the glossy, artificial perfection of montages that conveniently skip to the required moments in their continued friendship - Takao tells Yukino he wants to be a shoemaker but is frustrated in this, Yukino offers to let him use her feet to model the shoes, they share food, etc - in order to give you the digested version of what would surely have been a far more complex narrative (especially given what we learn about who Yukino is), with a lot more hesitation on both sides.
Sometimes a lean film is good, but at 46 minutes, The Garden of Words is simply rushed. This doesn't ruin it, but it does ensure that it can't be better than quite good, as it fails to find anything insightful or specific to say about how strangers can fall in love with each other due to shared loneliness; it just assumes they will if they're both nice enough and lonely enough, and cuts in a great many gorgeous shots of pouring rain on flowers and trees with serene piano music to convince you of the illusion.