Every person reacts in a different way to certain event in their life. Haruki, the protagonist of the movie, lives his life alone. He goes through his everyday life with minimum interactions with other people. He finds solace in the world of books which is predictable, convenient and non-judgemental. Basically he has zero experience in reacting to people. And when he accidentally finds out that one of his classmate, Sakura, is going to die because of terminal disease, he finds it difficult to comprehend and to react to this information. This movie is about how Haruki learns to react to people, interact with them, coming to terms with and to enjoy the unpredictability of people and finally to comprehend the seriousness of the situation Sakura is facing as her life is ending in-front of her eyes.
Basically this is coming off age story of Haruki.
In life when faced with terminal disease people face difficulty in deciding how to behave in front of others. Whether they should put up a brave front so that others around them will feel at ease, whether they should accept the jumble of emotions (anger, fear, sorrow, hope) and express them to others or whether to run away from this situation and try to forget the sad truth by either doing the things they wanted to do all their life or hiding the truth from everyone and interacting normally with everyone around them. When faced with same situation, Sakura, the female protagonist, chooses the last options. Through the movie she transitions through all the above stages as she experiences different situations with Haruki.
She tries to find normalcy in this hopeless situation by sticking with Haruki who has yet to understand the severity of Sakura's situation and thus ends up reacting normally the news of her terminal disease. With different situations throughout the movie these two characters grow as a human being. I found it beautiful and sad. At the end of the movie when Haruki cried his heart out I felt multiple emotions flowing through me.
I enjoyed this movie. I will definitely recommend this movie to everyone.
My scores:
Story: 9
Art: 9
Sound: 9
Characters: 9
Enjoyment: 10
Overall: 10
