Some artists are obsessed with a particular idea. They return to it again and again in their works, approaching it from different angles, clothing it in different circumstances, until it might be tempting to accuse them of having no other ideas at all. Sometimes this might even be true. However, assuming the artist is not merely second rate then this insistence on a single concept means something.
They are looking for its perfect expression.
There are ideas, ideas which cannot be translated into words, or which when so transcribed lose all the potency of their meaning. Simply explaining them doesn’t work. It is as though without being somehow embodied they are stripped naked of nuance and hence insight; all that is left is the ugly wireframe that can only hint at what is lacking. And of course, having said so, I proceed promptly to do so with no apparent irony.
For example, Satoshi Kon was a man obsessed with the inner world, particularly its multiplicity. Throughout his works the same issues repeat themselves insistently, the driving problem that people possess many personas and that these personas are at once intimately linked and yet jarringly discordant with their external social face. His characters don’t know who they are or what they want, and almost inevitably the world of the mind overflows and begins to fight back, usually violently, with a resolution that asserts its (tenuous) primacy.
Mamoru Oshii is another such case. Ghost in the Shell involves a loss/blurring of humanity to technology and Patlabor 2 has the iconic monologue on exploitation by the industrialized world. Jin-roh is a piece on power and the inescapability of the system. While all pressing issues in themselves, what he really keeps returning to are cityscapes. Vast, squalid, disorganized, his worlds are never inviting. What Oshii struggles with is alienation and these are its manifold expressions. That his first serious work was Angel’s Egg, a film that is emphatically not cyberpunk yet still retains this ethos of Godforsaken emptiness, seems to me to be the clearest expression, and I think in many ways still his best piece.So what is it that Makoto Shinkai pursues? I would say that he is a romantic in the idealistic sense of the word, and like all romantics seeks a certain completion in vital experience. Vibrancy is life. Which is why he is also a romantic in the common parlance as well, a person who extols love and who in every movie he makes centers on people finding wholeness through an intimate bond with a soulmate. In his own words, there is a “vague loneliness of living” [1] and this is the remedy that makes it bearable.
Yet from the beginning there is a problem in his works, a stormcloud that never could be properly dispelled. These vital connections are both temporary and fragile. In Voices of a Distant Star (2002) the two characters begin happily together and then the world intervenes to take them apart; the entire OVA is their struggle to hold onto this link even as time and distance make it impossible. The ending tries to console us that lovers are never truly separated… but the girl never returns. The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004) has the same arc, a trio of friends who are scattered by sudden tragedy, and as the title suggests, they spend the rest of the movie striving to reach the place where they wanted to go. To how life was meant to be. The resulting conclusion is a kludge, at once trying to reaffirm hope while admitting that something crucial was lost. Shinkai didn’t know how to end it here either.
Space and time. These are Shinkai’s metaphorical stock and trade, his tools to constantly pry his happy groups apart physically such that they are also rent emotionally. Sometimes people say that they stand for the emotional distance itself, and that’s a fair interpretation, but I think it’s better to see them as processes. That he’s not representing static interpersonal barriers to love, but that there’s something about the universe which inexorably grinds forward and severs those who have made true connections. Shinkai’s space-time is expanding and takes his characters with it; even if they do not move, especially if they do not move, they become increasingly separated. This is why his early movies lack coherent resolutions. What caused the separation is ongoing and he doesn’t have an answer as to how to stop it. Which brings us to 5cm/sec.
An Offering and a Sacrifice
By 5cm/sec (2007) Shinkai’s search has reached an impasse. How can he get an ending that works? First, he does away with extreme contrivances. While they were useful tools for getting at his central theme of separation, there was always an artificiality to them, a sense that he was throwing people into strange and forlorn situations just to prove a point. They couldn’t quite fulfill the function he desired if they were to be relevant as well as emotional.
Having abandoned his forced conceits, 5cm/sec gained a clarity in its narrative: while the world once again conspires to split the happy couple, there is no fantastic barrier that makes resuming the past impossible. It was chance that led to memories, and memories that give rise to a longing that remains forever in dreams. After that life drifted downstream as it is wont to do, the mundane accreating and burying what once was. In other words, that the soul-satisfying consummation failed to last cannot be blamed on exceptional individual circumstances but the intractable nature of life and being human itself. There was never any way around it.
Here, at last, is where Shinkai’s love of spectacle finds meaning. He is perhaps overly fond of the grand shot, the sweeping emotional panorama that seeks to snatch up the audience and carry them away. Indeed, people love him for it. Yet in 5cm/sec the grandest image is fake, the embellished scene with the perfect girl one of fantasy. As alluring as that vision is, as beautiful as it may seem, it does not exist. The good things in life cannot last forever and the greatest in his mind is always elusive in its fullness. To confront this directly would be despair for a romantic, though, and such is the conundrum of Shinkai-turned-main character that he avoids admitting its untruth so that he may continue to live there.For this is the purpose of his characters in these early productions. They are remarkably basic; enough detail to be convincingly human, but are hardly anything more. This is an oft-cited complaint with 5cm/sec, but I would suggest another way of looking at it: they are archetypally human. Shinkai doesn’t want to tell the whole of somebody’s story; he wants to tell a part of everybody’s story, the problem he is wrestling with, and these characters are his vessels for doing so. Love thwarted, love missed, and love withered - these are elemental. It reminds me of a quote about Millet:
”[Millet] was often conscious that these ideas had the character of symbols - that is to say he related an incident to a general scheme of things, and used the resultant shape to awaken a train of vaguely impressive emotions.” [2]
Shinkai is after an essence, captured in that flash of looking at a phone on a darkened hillside: illuminated as though he were the only thing in the world, musing on his own forlorn state, holding the very means to end it, yet inexplicably choosing not to he instead continues to write messages he does not send. It’s the vision. It is too beautiful. To finally send the message would be to try and make it real, and every time he has tried to do that before it has failed. The movie would end poorly once again, mired in Shinkai’s halfhearted attempt to not really have the boy meet the girl in reality, but have the girl somehow join the boy in fantasy.It is not until he is nearly sick to death from clutching the memory to his chest, having not only hurt others but unable to any longer pretend to move forward himself, that he is forced to confront the truth. Yes, the tenderness and the love were good; to see her sitting there after a hard journey, waiting as long as necessary, takes the breath away. Such a memory should be cherished. But not enshrined. To pin all hope, past and future, on finding a salve to existence through a perfect connection is to be inevitably disappointed. It was the greater answer he had been struggling with all along: he couldn’t guarantee his characters’ happiness because nothing lasts.
So in a leap that elevates everything, Shinkai gives it up.
When the moon overhead proves insubstantial, the stones in the just-awakened light and the bike basket dripping rain water remain. I once heard the movie referred to as, “5 wallpapers per second” and setting aside the glibness, it is yet true. On a first viewing one watches the train ride with trepidation, wondering if he’ll make it and worried he won’t. On a second the journey recedes and the eye is allowed to linger on what surrounds him and be impressed in the almost-literal sense: to receive an impression, to have something stamped upon the mind through it. It is the inexpressible idea, that when viewed with preternatural clarity these things are rough-hewn and contingent yet… somehow essential. Timeless in the instant of being perceived. Even the monumental rocket, made small at a distance, travelling at supersonic speeds, moves with a deliberate, one could say inevitable, grace. Everything is here yet gone yet real.At this point I fear people are nodding sagely; “Yes, to find true happiness one must enjoy the moment rather than live in the past.” True… and entirely wrong. If that were all it would have been a good message, but that is merely the byproduct of the insight. The fantasy was true happiness itself, exemplified for Shinkai by this singular girl in the most profound and intimate bonds he can imagine being immune to time.
Now at the end of the movie, he thought he had caught sight of her, as he had so many times before [3], this perfect existence, believing her as always to be within reach. Then the trains come and prevent him from giving chase. It would seem to be the same old story, the world always coincidentally thwarting him as he waits anxiously for the opportunity to be (re)united. One more time, just one more time and when he turns around she will be there. Then the trains are gone and so is she. He cannot be sure she was ever even there.And in the final moments, after a look of dismay that there is only an empty space, almost inexplicably, he smiles. In order to smile as he does it cannot only be the hope that is given up (for that leads to despair), but the hope of the hope that was the burden all along. Shinkai found his ending, and although it wasn’t the ending he sought it was the ending that was true. The boom rises and he does not go looking for her, at last free to walk away.
After the Tracks
At the beginning of his career, Shinkai wrote and animated a short titled, She and Her Cat (1999). Narrated from the perspective of a cat who falls in love with his female owner, it has all the pieces that would eventually make their way into 5cm/sec: the girl saved him from a lonely existence, the girl is everything, she is the perfect (yet faceless) image that real companions cannot compare with. Yet it is forlorn, because despite the proximity he can never truly be with her, and although the world spins on against his wishes he finds some appreciation for it nonetheless.
5 centimeters per second is a high water mark of anime cinema, not just as a visual treat but a piece of genuine art that brings into perfect clarity Shinkai’s singular purpose and crowning, sublime insight. In the years since first viewing it, it has never been challenged for my favorite animated film. Although I am loath to invoke this word because of how it is relentlessly degraded by overuse, it is truly a masterpiece. However, I also believe it to be the high point of Shinkai’s career, an opinion which is perhaps less welcomed.After 5cm/sec it seems to me Shinkai was at a loss as to what to say. He found the end of the road. He next produces Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011), a movie with a very pointed title as to his lesson learned, and it ends with a similar message of the futility of chasing after what cannot be had and an acceptance of sadness as it is. However, it is… messy… in getting there. I cannot help but feel that Shinkai has not the touch for questions of Mystery and death; that’s not a direction his personality can take.
Following on its heels is the better-known Garden of Words (2013), a movie where he returns to familiar territory (literally; he lived in Shinjuku for ten years). Yet it evidences all the ambivalence of somebody still not settled with his answer; it is both beautiful and brutal, after all. He wants to be philosophical about it but the impassioned last speech shows that he, personally, hasn’t been reconciled. Why can’t people get what they want? So when the ending comes and the couple separates as he knows they must… he yet furtively slips in after the credits to reassure us it is temporary. Things can work out if you try hard enough, right? Right. [4]To be clear, I’m not criticizing happy endings. And I’m most certainly ignoring that Shinkai was trying to accomplish other things with this film as well. But when it comes to truth-seeking, it is vacant. It’s almost visible, how flat the same types of scenes appear when compared with their predecessors. Without a purpose, the scenery is merely pretty… and forgettable. This sentiment extends to the extremely-popular Your Name (2016), where although he may tease us for a few minutes at the end, Shinkai gives us exactly what we want. Time and space bend over backward to reunite the lovers now. The message is completely gone. [5]
However, I do not wish to end this essay so glumly. It would be a poor way to give homage. The insight Shinkai offers at his best is both deep and genuine, and I in no way mock any tardiness in coming to it nor inconsistency in holding to it. Rather, I admire what he reached and was able to convey to the audience in his magnum opus. Would that I could do so well. Similarly, all his films have a touch of romantic sincerity that even when he becomes melodramatic still shines through. He truly believes in it. And even if it is partially make-believe, it’s nice to be reminded of how sweet it can be.
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Notes:
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171023140911/http://www2.odn.ne.jp/~ccs50140/cat/index.html, but truthfully I just got it from the reference section of She and Her Cat Wikipedia page. The second paragraph in the “Production” section is worth reading as it’s a remarkable summary of his views.[2] Clark, Sir Kenneth. The Romantic Rebellion. New York, Harper & Row, 1973. Page 296.
[3] A small note on the final song-montage that is worth making: 5cm/sec is a story about people too, and to completely devolve into the metaphorical would cause it to lose something. So while the images serve to show his preoccupation with a dream girl, intermixed with some gorgeous views of the mundane world, it also demonstrates that the actual girl did care about him too. Her feelings weren’t any less than his, and her moving on isn’t a sign of frailty or insincerity. What they had was good and real.
As for the song itself, I always hated it. My description in an early review was “generic caterwauling.” Having paid closer attention, though, I’ve found that the lyrics are remarkably on-point, the title (“One More Time”) being an accurate diagnosis of the problem. So I am left unsure if the song is meant to be sincere and I merely find it sentimental in tone (Shinkai is more unabashedly emotional than I), or if perhaps it is a bit maudlin on purpose, reflecting the foolishness of his choices.
[4] These two movies, Children and Garden, are remarkably informative as to Shinkai’s trajectory. To point out a few aspects:
1) Science vs fantasy: In Shinkai’s earlier works his conceits are all science-based (intergalactic wars, multidimensions). This to me seems to reflect a desire on his part to be relevant and realistic, expressing something about this universe rather than another. Even in 5cm/sec when he has “come down to earth” he still peppers in Cambrian Explosion references with the delight of somebody who genuinely appreciates the wonder.
In Children, though, he tries to imitate Miyazaki’s fantasy-adventure approach while yet retaining his own modern-day imagination (there is even a token mention of an extinct animal again). It’s like he can’t quite make up his mind. The rebound to Garden strikes me as going back to what he knows he’s good at: clear, simple narratives of couples rather than grand worldbuilding (and as he comments later, nobody can imitate Miyazaki; he knows because he’s tried). Now with his latest movies he’s mostly settled on reality-defying fantasy as the mechanism, but nestled in the modern world he’s comfortable working with (“I can’t draw anything with a sense of reality if it doesn’t come from a place I’m connected to with my own two feet.”), spiced with a few science-ish elements (like meteor impacts) that stock his mind.
2) Length: to expand a little on the Garden rebound, I think that Shinkai is most successful conveying his ideas in shorts. He has a single, core theme that does better when condensed like poetry. His early feature-lengths (Place Promised, Children) are some of his less successful projects as it doesn’t feel like he quite knows how to convey his sentiments in a large narrative. 5cm/sec’s structure plays to this strength, partitioning itself into 20-minute segments which allow him to focus his ideas. That Garden is only 40 minutes after Children’s nearly two hours is likely a reflexive attempt to regain that clarity.
3) Family and Other Options: After 5cm/sec familial relationships play an increasing role in his works. This seems like trying to diversify after having mined out the romantic bond theme. Can maybe family ties do something romantic ones cannot? Not quite, and in both Children and Garden the families are as susceptible to parting as lovers are - although in his short, Someone’s Gaze (2013) he does try to maintain that familial bonds are evergreen.
What’s doubly interesting is that for Garden Shinkai also says explicitly he was going for a different kind of romance (I’m not going to pretend I did any deep research; this is skimmed from the Garden Wikipedia page). Once again, it seems to me like he’s trying to find some other theme, some other problem, some other answer to center his movie around after having summed it up in 5cm/sec.
[5] I feel as though I must include this note to disarm at least some of the ire. I do not believe Your Name is a bad or unenjoyable movie. It took me out of myself for 100 minutes with surprising effectiveness; it was extremely fun to go see in theaters. However, it is fundamentally designed to be popular rather than truthful. That he has even openly stated his goal with Weathering With You was to make a film that expanded his audience, it seems to me Shinkai is conscious of this; people want emotional punches followed by happy endings, and that is what he is delivering.
