Every now and then we come across an anime that makes our hearts feel something that we’ve been longing to feel. That feeling can’t be described nor understood but rather felt. Now don’t get me wrong, while the gory battles of Attack on Titan and the crazy action of One Punch Man and other anime shows are great. Sometimes you just want a story, a story we can closely relate to and one such story is what we find in the anime movie Garden of Words.

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Garden of words

Garden of words is one of the first anime films created by Makoto Shinkai, a creator that has delivered us some of the best anime shows. So let’s go back in time and talk about the “Garden of words”.

Overall the movie has a runtime of merely 40 minutes. While this time may seem little Makoto somehow manages to portray a beautiful love story in so little time, and with such eloquence.

Tone

Like all of previous Makoto’s work, Garden of Words also follows are serious tone, yet it’s still not monotonous. This is because while in most of his works Makoto has used story-driven dialogue to be a way to tell the tale, in this particular movie it is the images that speak louder than words. For example, if we were to take Yukine, the female lead. You’ll notice that every moment of hers is breathtakingly stunning, from her facial expressions, and hands, to her feet everything looks perfect right to the last nook, with each panel portraying a story of its own. This is how Makoto prevents the movie from being monotonous because even though the main plot revolves around the companionship of Yukine and Takao. In the brief time where the two are shown to themselves alone, we can see each of them with their own sets of problems and how as each spends time together, their problems diminish.

Realistic

When watching anime even though realism is something we don’t think of, this story brings that into play. Which is a nice change of pace in the genre.

We see Takao fall in love and then confess to Yukine, who’s a teacher at his high school even though Yukine may feel something in her heart, she knows too that at the end of the day she’s an adult and Takao is a kid. For once in an anime, the odds win and the protagonists of the film lose. Yet that for us as viewers is not a dissatisfying end to the movie but rather a perfect one. Simply because of two things;

1. “Clouded skies, even if rain comes not, I’ll stay here together with you still.” This is the promise that Takao makes to Yukine, and he does keep it because when winter arrives despite Yukine not being present there leaves the shoes he made for her in hopes of finding his way to her one day.

2. Each of the characters get to grow and mature in their way. Takao finally gets a taste of the adult world he’s been craving and Yukine finally learns to walk on her own.

The featured image at the beginning of this post is from MenielDM of PixaBay.