5 Centimeters Per Second - Reception

Reception

The film won the Lancia Platinum Grand Prize at the Future Film Festival for best movie in animation or special effects. It won the Award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 2007 Asia Pacific Screen Awards. The limited edition DVD of the film was ranked 3rd on the Tohan charts between 18–24 July 2007, while the regular edition of the film was ranked 7th. The film was Japan's fourth most popular Blu-ray film in 2008.

Shinkai has been hailed as the next Miyazaki, and his dreamy mindscapes often equal or surpass the anime maestro in breadth of detail and depth of emotion. Shinkai extends the innate possibilities of the anime dynamic, reapplying its principles of lush effects, inflated background detail and sometimes undernourished character animation to mirror the interiority of the characters in every nuance of their surroundings." – Ronnie Scheib from Variety

Mania.com lists 5 Centimeters Per Second as the best non-Miyazaki anime. The Japan Times's Mark Schilling commends Shinkai saying that he is better than Hayao Miyazaki "at piercing the veil of the everyday to reveal a poignant, evanescent beauty most of us notice only in rare moments." Anime News Network's Bamboo Dong commends the anime for its "heartbreakingly gorgeous" piano score composed by Tenmon, which "contributes to the dreamlike quality that the film has". She also comments that film "never comes out and tells you what the characters are feeling. It never follows a strict storyline, but between the interactions on the screen and well-timed shots of lonely landscapes, everything is as clear as night and day". Mania.com's Chris Beveridge criticises the anime for its aliasing as well as it "seems to get a fairly low bitrate during a lot of it which leads to some noisy and overly grainy feeling areas. The film has so many lush colors to it that a lot of them start to show too much noise at times which is almost as distracting as the aliasing." Theron Martin reviewing for Anime News Network commends "The production also excels in its use of sound effects, especially in the bow-shooting scenes in Part 2".

Taken individually, the parts offer nice little vignettes, but taken as a whole they paint a broader picture about the progression of life and love. The ending, which is where this work differs most from Shinkai's previous efforts, will doubtless be controversial and may leave some fans unsatisfied, as it opens itself to multiple interpretations. Some may feel as if it just ends without resolving anything, but if one considers Takaki's few lines of narration in part two, how that part ends, and how everything fits together, it becomes clearer that actually resolving things was never the point. Whereas Voices was about trying to maintain a connection and Place Promised was about reestablishing one, Five Centimeters is ultimately about moving on from past connections instead of just living in the past, about finding a way to become happy in the present rather than just pining for what has been lost over time. In that sense Five Centimeters is Shinkai's most mature and complicated work yet." – Theron Martin, Anime News Network

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