#12
5cm Per Second—henceforth "5cm" for the rest of this review—is a pleasant piece of work. I first viewed the OVAs several years ago near the birth of my slight addiction to anime. I watched it a second time a few months ago, and then again quite recently. All three times I have been glued to the screen, attempting to soak everything in. After three entirely different viewing times, I should know the ins and outs of the work, right? Unfortunately, that is not the case. There is something special about 5cm that I just cannot put my finger on. The feeling of "almost getting it but not quite" is a feeling that perturbs me to no end. As I am a person that likes to understand things, whether it relates to science or just "simple" anime, that feeling of irritation is justifiable on some level. On the surface, 5cm is very simple collection of OVAs, a quaint triad of short stories that Makoto Shinkai brings together to explore the realm of human relationships. Specifically, the distance between people. But first, I want to focus on the easier aspects of these OVAs: the technical aspects. To put it bluntly, if I ever needed a background or scenery artist, Makoto Shinkai is the man I would go to. His settings are absolutely stunning. The grassy plain under the celestial vista drenched in colorful swirls and lights that only astrological bodies can provide. The life-like luster of desks and vehicles pelted by the soft cherry blossoms drifting lazily in the wind. The sparkling, yet somehow fittingly stark layer of snow that seems to wrap the entire world in a comforting embrace that only fairy tales provide. The distant horizon marking the boundary of an infinitely distant azure sky, peppered with the clouds that bring forth tendrils of shadow to contrast with the warm illumination of the sun. If it is not obvious to you yet, let me be clear: I absolutely adored the scenery art. As for everything else regarding the art, this is where it starts to become iffy. Do not get me wrong, the artwork overall is stunning. The animation is, well, animation. There is nothing wrong with the animation unless you are particularly scrutinizing. My problem, if you can call it a problem, is the character designs. Compared to the fantastic scenery, the characters look incredibly drab. 5cm suffers from a case that several other anime go through when pumping their respective works in production value: overspecialization. 5cm worked so hard in utterly pimping its background visuals to the pristine levels of eye candy—especially for a work made in 2007—that it forgot to work on the characters. After seeing, or at least glimpsing, quite a bit of Makoto Shinkai's other works, the problem does not reside solely in 5cm. Makoto Shinkai is simply "bad" at drawing people. He can draw literally everything with beauty and detail except people, apparently. Frankly, I find that utterly hilarious, especially since the main focus of his works is the human condition. In any case, this is not to say that the characters of 5cm are atrocious eldritch abominations, it is simply that the characters seem a little "off" when compared to the scenery in which they dwell. It is the uncanniness that only the placement of decent looking characters atop an overpowering background can provide. A slight sense of oddity when viewing, you could say. On to the next technical aspect: the sound. The audio quality of 5cm is on the same level as the art, which is to say amazing. What I liked most about 5cm audio-wise was the restraint regarding the use of background OSTs. The viewer is not bombarded with musical melodies around the clock. The OSTs are carefully placed at key moments throughout the OVAs and no where are they used just to fill in the silence. Heck, one of my favorite moments in all anime revolves around the lack of music in 5cm. Takaki's train ride is a brilliant case for this. Most other anime stick sharp, contrasting orchestras or ominous chanting to bring forth a sense of anxiety. Oh no, not in 5cm, and it does it for the better. Aside from the growing desperation in Takaki's narration regarding his journey aboard the train, there are only 2 other things the viewer hears: the train announcements and the snow outside. The train announcements complement the snow beautifully here, showcasing two facets of what I consider the same wish. The train announcements spew forth the same dreaded announcements over and over again, dredging pangs of dull panic and anxiety in Takaki. The sense of growing despair and anxiety was so palpable during his ride that I was thinking that Takaki would do anything to get to his destination a little faster. But. . . He can't. He can only wait. The steady howl of the snow filled wind is the only answer Takaki ever gets to his mental pleas, enhancing the cold and uncaring nature of his small trip through life. Time forever marches onward, after all. The drone of the train engine, the car in which Takaki sits in, and Takaki himself are unimaginably small and insignificant compared to everything around him. His pleas and wishes cracking under the weight of anxiety ultimately do not matter to the world, but they are the world to him, yet he can not do anything about it. The anxiety and sincerity of this scene was just achingly beautiful. In regards to the voice acting, they were very well done. There are two English dubs, the ADV and the Bang Zoom dub. If you are unsure of which version to watch, watch the Bang Zoom version. Both have slightly different translations of the original Japanese dialogue, but I found that Bang Zoom's version had a more charming and natural interpretation of it. Not only that, Bang Zoom's voice actors were a notch higher in quality and talent than ADV's voice actors. Again, just pick Bang Zoom. If you prefer subs with the original Japanese audio, I sure hope that those are Japanese subs, not English ones. Reading subs tend to distract the viewer, or at least me, from appreciating the nuances and subtleties of the voice actors in their roles. For a case like 5cm, those minor things are very important to the overall impression and feeling the viewer gets from the OVAs. Therefore, if you are stuck with the "Subs are better than dubs" mentality, perish the thought just for 5cm and watch the dubs. Unless, of course, you understand Japanese, in which case either is fine as long as you are not reading a swatch of subtitles. Finally, the main meat of any anime: the story. It may seem odd, but 5cm does not really have a story. It starts and ends subtlety, leaving the context and "lessons learned" to the viewer. 5cm is, after all, just three short stories involving three people, only connected by their minor and fleeting encounters with one another by wistful strands of fate. Enjoying 5cm purely depends on your mindset before watching because, again, nothing extraordinary or typically anime-esque happens. If you come to the show upbeat and expecting action or laughs, expect to be bored incredibly fast. In other words, "Nothing really happens" is a succinct summary of what 5cm has going for it. The OVAs here are completely mellow, skirting the edge of being poetic, perhaps. Was anything suppose to happen? Of course not. 5cm is about human distance, after all. It emulates the steady monotony of real life as best as an anime can respectably achieve. There are no grand epiphanies or measurable changes of heart in real life, just the passage of time to tick away our lives second by second. Watching 5cm gave me an almost overbearing sense of nostalgia, reminiscing on where I have been and the people I have met. The very people that shaped me into the person I am today and will most likely never see again. The feelings Makoto Shinkai aims for are feelings that not many of us think about unless we are leaving on some sort of journey ourselves with little hope of returning. The sense of tightness in your chest as you move on with your life. 5cm encompasses this and so much more. Hell, the last few minutes of 5cm succeeds in bringing the sense of what it means to live life than what many other anime fail to do in entire seasons. Masayoshi Yamazaki's "One more time, one more chance" is simply a concentrated mass of awesome amidst scenes of the three main characters at various stages of life, living in the ways that only they know how. Not only were these last few minutes amazing, but the moment just before is just as beautiful. An ordinary scene that gained so much more meaning after repeated watching. It was a scene that I did not notice when I first watched 5cm so many years ago. The scene where Takaki enters the convenience store where "One more time, one more chance" is playing over the radio. Takaki pauses right after the door and listens, if just for a short moment. It made me wonder what Takaki was thinking about. . .It made me wonder what I, as well as those around me, would be thinking about many years from now. What would we think about after what seems like an endless flow of experiences and meetings? For some reason, the thought makes me unbearably sad. A sense of loneliness at the frailty and smallness of human life, or life in general for that matter. As a kid, I used to go outside at night and look up. Look up at the stars in the endless sky. The stars that I saw are unimaginably far away, and the stars that I did see might as well have been a speck of sand on the beach along the shores of the vast universe. It is impossible for me to imagine Earth, or my life for that matter, to scale with that vastness. 5cm Per Second brought this memory back to me and frankly, I need more of this type of anime.