Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Joanna Mccarty Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

nestoryaviti This is my second Makoto Shinkai anime to watch after seeing your name and I absolutely love it. Its story telling is wonderful and its stunning to look at. A beautiful art and a must see even if you don't like anime. Makoto Shinkai is truly a master of the arts.

CinemaClown Tenderly crafted, sensibly narrated & carrying an emotional weight that bursts open in the final moments, Makoto Shinkai's fourth feature film is a small-scale, down-to-earth effort that just manages to quality as a feature-length narrative, and offers a fascinating take on loneliness.Set in Tokyo during the rainy season, The Garden of Words follows an aspiring 15-year old shoemaker who skips his morning classes to design shoes in a Japanese garden. The plot focuses on the relationship that blossoms between him & a mysterious but older woman whom he keeps meeting there every time it rains.Written & directed by Makoto Shinkai, the story is short, simple & emotionally rich, and is gorgeously animated from start to finish. Majority of its plot unfolds inside the Japanese garden, and the lush background, vivid use of colour palette & photorealistic rendering of the surrounding really makes that place stand out.Despite its 46 minutes runtime, the characters are given enough space to breathe and their bonding is allowed to bloom at a gradual pace. Loneliness is evident in their individual lives but romance in their companionship is illustrated in a more subtle fashion. The age difference between the two never becomes an issue, and is handled with care.On an overall scale, The Garden of Words is a sumptuously animated, exquisitely detailed & brilliantly voiced film that's visually appealing & emotionally touching for the most part, and is an interesting addition to Makoto Shinkai's filmography. Its melodramatic tone & overdose of sentimentality during the climactic moment may undo it for a few but for me, it's definitely one of Shinkai's better films.

phoenix 2 Short and with magnificent colours, Garden of Words enchants with the drawings, but the story wasn't quite there. The romance was weak, as the relationship between a young student who wants to become a shoemaker, and a strange older lady, who seems to struggle being an adult, becomes gradually something more than just two people sharing a bench in a rainy day. It would have been a good love story, only if there was some spark or at least some stronger emotions other than poetry and idyllic garden scenes. The characters were much more complex than what the story presents them at first, unfolding gradually and letting the viewer get to know them better and understand them as well. However, for me, it felt like the movie needed some more time to conclude. And for that, I'm giving this film 4 out of 10.

Diels Alder When I was in my junior year of college I used to eat lunch in a resource centre twice a week because it was never crowded. There was a group of seniors who used to do the same thing, and one day I sat at their table. While there was not a lot of rapport to start, we found some common ground over upper-level coursework and I began eating my lunch with them. Over the course of the semester I came to talk a lot to a woman who was almost always there, whether the others were or not, and our conversation became quite enjoyable. Eventually the semester came to an end, she graduated, and I never saw her again. We had been talking twice a week for ~3 months and I had never learned her name nor seen her outside of the resource centre.I'll admit that I'm a little non-standard when it comes to social interactions (e.g. never asking her name), however I share this anecdote to say that this kind of thing does happen in real life. Moreover, you can really connect with someone while knowing almost nothing about them and I found the development of Yukino and Akizuki's companionship to be spot on. Fortunately, I don't think either my compatriot nor I had as much baggage as these two characters (and, unsurprisingly, there was no big climax in my story).Nonetheless, there is a certain kind of beauty in these ephemeral friendships that fall together from (temporarily) shared schedules and this is captured perfectly by Mokoto Shinkai.