Makoto Shinkai, the anime director I fell in love with after watching Kimi No Na Wa, and Tenki No Ko, has astounding artistic talent, and has made some amazing films. I decided I wanted to go back and watch some of his older films, and so far, I’m not impressed.
While I do love Shinkai, it’s kind of hard to deny that he has a problem with pacing. This shows up very much so in this film/3 part story. 5 centimeters per second consists of three parts. The first part is really good, and if I had to rate it on my own, it would probably be in the high 8’s to low 9’s. But this part alone does not make the entire thing good, no, it does far from it. The second part has horrible pacing that made me want to stop watching all together, and it introduces a fairly unlikeable character that we follow for the extent of the part. The name of this character is Kanae Sumida. Kanae feels like a very hollow, 2D character that is just there to show how the main character is always thinking about someone else. It was a very slow, and painful part, and led to an even worse part, part 3.
Part 3 was by far the worst part in the film. At around 10 minutes (excluding the outro) it adds nothing significant to the story, and abruptly ends with no real conclusion. All we learn is that the girl is married to someone else, and that they don’t talk anymore. Really, that’s all that happens. There‘s no real interaction between the two (aside from a single text message), and it leaves you with a feeling of anger. There’s also a 3-4 minute part before the credits that is just scenes of the movie replaying, making you think there might be something that’s about to happen, but nothing does, it’s literally just a replay of a few scenes with some music over it. I feel like if this movie had been longer, it might have been better, but there’s really no recovery from this awful third part.
As a whole, this movie is probably Shinkai’s worst I’ve seen, but I do still plan on watching his other films, I’ll just have to set my expectations lower.
