In 2007, Makoto Shinkai delivered what would become one of his most beloved animated films: 5 centimetres per second, a melancholic tale tracing out the aftermath of unrecruited love and missed encounters (General-note 1). Yet, despite its impact and the cultural importance it gained over the years, Shinkai always felt his film was incomplete – a flower not fully blossomed.

Due to this feeling, he welcomed a live-action version. He agreed to hand his budding flower over to different filmmakers in the hope that they, by re-interpreting the themes of loss, distance, missed encounters and re-examining characters, could make it fully blossom. In our view, Yoshiyuki Okuyama did right by Shinkai’s grounded anime, delivering an engaging slow-paced visually poetic meditation of the ‘injurious’ effect of remaining stuck in the past, of being unable to break the fixation with an impossible fantasy.     

Yoshiyuki Okuyama opens 5 Centimetres Per Second with an evocative sequence that invites the spectator to accept the deceit that structures the romance genre and grant it its emotional power. The trap – a trap the spectator must step in for any romance narrative to work – lies hidden within the statement made by Takaki Tono (Hokuto Matsumura): “I’m searching everywhere for that feeling I seem to have lost.”

Via this statement, the spectator is led to assume that what Tono has lost can be re-found – a feeling merely misplaced within his psyche. To put it differently, we must, as audience, accept that out there in the world – the world Tono stopped believing in – is a specific object that, by engaging with it, will allow him to re-access that ‘lost’ feeling. Tono, however, seemingly has no idea what this unreachable something he wants to touch is. 

Via his inner-speech, the spectator is – to put it more analytically – invited to accept the fantasy that The Sexual Relationship can be written. For every key-hole, there is a key that perfectly fits. The challenge is merely to (re-)encounter it and take hold of it. Okuyama’s tale of missed encounters, the concatenation of near misses, exploits the fantasy of the very possibility of such “fateful” encounter with the lost object to emotionally affect the spectator – to take him along on cinematic river of nostalgic melancholy and squeeze tears out his eyes.

However, such object does not exist in reality. The object we re-find is never the object that we lost; the object has always been lost, our lack is structural. There is no relational harmony that can be ‘naturally’ obtained (Narra-note 1). To make a sexual relationship work – to fabricate a workable sexual relationship, we need to lovingly force the key into a keyhole that is, by definition, mismatched.   

Okuyama introduces the spectator to the phantasmatic object that Tono considered lost, to the idealized object-of-desire that, despite being absent, has defined his subjective trajectory: Akari Shinohara (Mitsuki Takahata). With a heartwarming flashback sequence, Okuyama shows how the youthful encounter between Takaki Tono (Haruto Ueda) and Akari Shinohara (Nao Shiroyama) determined their subjective trajectory and their ‘desolate’ present – the encounter echoes unconsciously throughout their acts, signifiers, and ‘individual’ choices. Tono’s career in programming and Akari’s employment at a bookstore are rooted in a mere exchange of books in the school’s library. One could, in a sense, argue that both Tono and Shinohara realized the other’s gift by assuming it as one’s own desire.

As the narrative unfolds, Okuyama focuses on other relationships (e.g. Tono (Yuzu Aoki) and Kanae Sumida (Nana Mori) during high-school and between Tono and Risa Mizuno (Mai Kiryu)), to explore in what way these interactions turn to be encounters, become moments that leave their subjective mark. Okuyama, by utilizing these ‘marks’ to smoothen transitions from present to past, ends up poetically showing that what constitutes an encounter is the very mark it leaves on the subject; the interweaving of the other’s signifiers into the linguistic fabric of our own ego. It is via these slice-of-life explorations, via these slow-paced investigations of the circulation of the signifiers, that Okuyama touchingly shows that encounters are not always reciprocal (Psycho-note 1, psycho-note 2).

If 5 Centimetres per Second offers a message, it is the following: the only mis-encounter that inhibits Tono is the mis-encounter with the truth of the unwritable Sexual Relationship – he holds on to a fantasy that never existed. While many spectators will shed a tear because their hope of seeing Tono’s impossible fantasy become reality is thwarted – they might not even give up on such a possibility, the true emotional power of 5 centimetres Per Second lies in a-romantic laying bare of the phantasmatic nature of romance, of the subjective fabrication of love’s fatefulness – a truth that many will be reluctant to accept and a truth that Shinkai has, in a certain sense, betrayed with his later work.

The composition of 5 Centimetres Per Second stands out due to its dynamic feel – Okuyama fluidly combines floaty dynamic moments, shaky framing, slow-motion shots, … etc. By relying on camera movement, Okuyama succeeds in creating an aesthetically pleasing visual flow and litter his visual fabric with poetic plays with motion. Okuyama, however, does not ignore the power of the static shot – he thoughtfully interweaves static shots that, by being thoughtfully composed, impress the spectator with their still-life-like visual beauty. The dynamic feel of the composition, however, is not only function of Okuyama’s extensive use of camera movement, but also due to his effective play with compositional pace.

What also stands out in Okuyama’s composition is the soft, diffuse feel of the imagery – i.e. the rich use of depth-of-field background blur and filmic grain. One effect of Okuyama’s use of depth-of-field is that it allows him to subtly separate Tono from the narrative space that envelops him – his physical presence within the space is contrasted with an absence at the level of his subjectivity – the structural lack that he deems, due to his phantasmatic fixation, resolvable. In some cases, Okuyama resorts to other compositional elements like lighting to accentuate this separation, the reality of his absent presence. 

Okuyama also seeks to evoke the subjective position of Tono by thoughtfully utilizing colour schemes – colour-contrasts between scenes, colour-contrasts within the same shot. Many moments within 5 Centimetres Per Second are marked by faded darkish bluish or greenish colours, highlighting the solitude that clings to the main characters – a radical solitude originating from the absence of that what they have deemed lost.

Put in this way, it is not difficult to discern what Okuyama aims to evoke when he bathes Tono in yellowish and more brighter colours: it signals the (mental) proximity of the ‘lost object’, of what is fantasized and fabricated as the missing object, as what would resolve his structural lack (Narra-note 2). For Tono, this proximity is associatively intertwined with the sky and the vast space that lies beyond the earthly atmosphere – the fixation on space replaces the phantasmatic object-of-desire, Akari, that instigated his fascination and determined his subjective trajectory (Narra-note 3). Yet, audiences should be attentive, as many warmer scenes – scenes with a yellowish tint – put Tono, unlike those who circle around him, into the darkness of the shade, subtly echoing that the object that once brightened his life, the object he does not realize he is seeking, is absent (Colour-note 1).    

Okuyama utilizes musical accompaniment to heighten the poetic quality of his well-crafted imagery, to guide the impact of the characters’ enunciations (e.g. inner monologue) on the spectator, and to echo the subjective prison of solitude Tono finds himself locked up in.

The blend of music, imagery, and signifiers that opens 5 centimetres Per Second is, beyond aesthetically pleasing, effective in inviting the spectator to take Tono’s subjective riddle as the anchor to orient oneself within the narrative – and to take his belief in The Sexual Relationship for true. Okuyama interweaves similar musically driven visual compositions to great poetic and emotional effect throughout his narrative (Cine-note 1).

Praising many of the compositional elements of the film, one might forget that what makes this aesthetically pleasing envelope so effective in touching the spectator are the natural performances of the cast. The emotional dimension of the stylistic envelope thrives on the genuine quality the cast breathes into the interactional flow. Haruto Ueda and Nao Shiroyama, who bring Tono and Shinohara are elementary school students to life, deliver truly pitch-perfect performances. Nana Mori, on the other hand, impresses with the way she brings Sumida’s realization of the impossibility of reaching Tono romantically to life.   

5 Centimeters Per Second should be considered the fully blossomed fruit of Makoto Shinkai’s influential animated film. Okuyama does not only succeed in translating Shinkai’s visual language into a visual arresting journey that evocatively traces out the aftermath of the encounter, but utilizes the increased running time to thoughtfully elaborate on the effects the encounter sorts on the subject. Okuyama’s film, just like Shinkai’s anti-romance, ultimately asks the spectator to let go of the fantasy of The Sexual Relationship, to let go of the unobtainable fantasy that inhibits and, by emphasizing absence, imprisons him.

Notes

General-note 1: The title of the film, as has been argued elsewhere, refers both to the slow manner by which subjects often drift apart as well as the time certain subjects need to be able to make peace with the ephemerality of the past that has defined them.

Narra-note 1: Okuyama implies, with his emotional ending, that Akari Shinohara’s refusal to seek Tono out is animated by her melancholic realization that what they had is irreversibly lost. While she accepts the subjective importance of her past interactions with Tono, she also fully realizes the truth of the sexual non-relationship – a memory that can never become reality again.    

Psycho-note 1: The meeting of two subjects can be an encounter for one, but not for the other.

Psycho-Note 2: One might argue that the writability of the sexual relationship is touched upon within the narrative via the interplay of three signifiers – the (phallic) sun, the (lacking) moon, and brightness, however, upon closer analysis, the way Tono and Shinohara utilize these signifiers do not really generate a complementary signified.

For Akari, Tono functioned as the sun that allowed herself to brighten up her gloomy moon-like presence. While, in Tono’s case, it seems she functioned as the sun that brightened up his own moon-like existence. They both utilized the phallic brightness of the other subject to push away their own structural lack.  

This associative network – revealed in latter part of the narrative – re-affirms the evocative aim of Okuyama’s thoughtful approach to lighting with respect to Tono.

Narra-note 2: The use of darkish faded colours to frame the interactions between Risa Mizuno and Tono leave no doubt over the inability of Tono to re-find in her the phantasmatic object he lost.  

Narra-note 3: Let us not forget to note that the notion of space also has a subjective importance for Shinohara. This re-affirms that the meeting with Tono was, in all senses of the word, an encounter.   

Colour-note 1: Like always, there are some exceptions. One notable one is when Shinohara and Tono meet in Iwafuni on a winter’s night. As Okuyama seeks to keep a certain naturalism to his visual frame, he is unable to utilize lightning to emphasize the importance of what happens under the cherry blossom tree. Instead, he utilizes music to amplify the emotionality and the subjective importance of their last encounter.   

Cine-note 1: The composition centred on skyscapes, Kanae Sumida’s attempts to surf, and the struggle to act upon one’s feelings and confess, is highly evocative of the seishun-period.