Tohno Takaki as a child falls in love with his close friend Shinohara Akari, but due to their parents work both of them are forced to move far away from each other. His journey is given to us in three short stories showing him as a young boy coping with their move, as a teenager with a lost sense of purpose due to the unavoidable fact that he and his childhood friend have grown apart and finally as an adult who goes through life without much risk or enthusiasm as he still mourns over something special in his childhood that he let slip away.
This story is told perfectly in these three episodes, each one has the right amount of drama to show the characters personal struggle and still have you contemplating how they will move on from it and the end of the segment. The art style and animation is very clean and beautiful and has some breathtaking scenery at times and excellent character design, overall it is a great film both for its story and the way in which it is told. That said I do have one criticism...
I mentioned before how the director uses this metaphor of '5 centimeters per second' to represent how slowly we humans drift apart, it was a brilliant idea to have had the story progress along three episodes to bring to life that feeling of slowly losing touch with ones childhood; but the pacing of this film was also taken very slowly which let it down a bit for me.
What I mean by this is the speed in which the camera shots changed and the tempo of the music, throughout the film it kept to the same slow pace to add to the metaphor but this meant that the more dramatic scenes had little tension built up and lost some meaning to them, It was hard to be lost in a scene without tension and I found myself still sitting waiting for something to happen in the end. Which is a bad point but in some ways maybe a good one as well because when I think back to the story that feeling of wanting something to happen is still there and that is the main point of the plot that the main characters all shared.
Overall though it is still a excellent film that I regard as a must see! I complained but still found myself liking it enough to create a AMV to it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNajN6Y9o8&feature=plcp&list=PL0192A99BE0BC2157
Check it out if you interested in the film and want to see how it looks and feels
