Every time it rains, 15-year-old Takao Akizuki (Miyu Irino) skips his class to stay in the garden at Shinjuku Gyoen. As the rain pours, the boy spends his time designing shoes.
One day, Takao meets an enigmatic girl staying in the same garden. The girl is Yukari Yukino (Kana Hanazawa), a 27-year-old teacher who is skipping work.
The two continue to meet and bond every time it rains in the same place. Despite Takao's cluelessness about Yukari's personal life, he promises that he will someday make her a pair of shoes. Yukari agrees, but by the end of the rainy season, Takao stops visiting.
Makoto Shinkai's 2013 film "The Garden of Words" is simply a combination of sublime animation and heartfelt emotion.
Shinkai really knows how to make the film's look and feel exquisite. "The Garden of Words" is vivid, colorful, and breathtaking. It feels like it's romanticizing Japan and all of its nuances. From the raindrop on a train's window to the city skyline, everything is picture perfect.
But Shinkai's work tends to get overly cheesy and unrealistic if we remove all of these ravishing landscapes.
Like most of his films, "The Garden of Words" talks about longing and loving on a philosophical level. His love to encrypt his story's message with poetry and weighty narration works sometimes. But most of the time, it impedes the viewer's connection to the characters and narrative.
Honestly, there is no need to complicate Takao and Yukari's relationship. They are two individuals who find comfort with each other. Amidst the loneliness and sadness they feel, they find themselves saving one another. But the film needs to play around a little to stretch the narrative into a 45 minutes feature. So Shinkai showers the viewers with sceneries and expositions that add little to no contribution to the overall story.
Melodramatic storytelling should be a weapon to be used sparingly.
Though, I have no hate for this short film. I actually find it as a beautiful thesis on friendship, loneliness, and sadness. I like how self-aware it is, touching on topics such as bullying and depression.
My only wish is for Makoto Shinkai to stop meandering and start to tell his story more clearly and concisely.
2.5/5
