The more I explore Makoto Shinkai’s backlog, the more convinced I become that Your Name was such a success in large part because it introduced the one element that his previous work lacks: joy. Prior to his blockbuster smash, Shinkai’s work was all incredibly atmospheric and subdued, painted in brush strokes of sadness and longing, tempered by sad piano music and pining across distance that crescendos and fades into a vibrant nothingness of lonely color and light. As a filmmaker, he’s obsessed with the ache of the barriers between people, the feeling that comes when the person you long to be with is separated from you by time, or space, or circumstances. But as good as he is at capturing that feeling, his pre-Your Name works just never feel as complete as they could be without the humor and heart of Mitsuha and Taki’s star-crossed shenanigans. It was the interplay of happiness and sorrow that made Your Name’s darker, sadder moments dig under your skin and linger; by capturing a much broader swath of the emotional spectrum, Shinkai was able to craft a blockbuster that felt in-the-moment riveting and achingly poignant in equal measure. Without that element of joyful determination, he’s a limited instrument, playing the same beat over and over again in monotone. No matter how well he plays that beat, it’s never going to leave the same impact as the harmonic symphony of Your Name.

That said, I think 5 Centimeters per Second is a much better application of his penchant for melancholy lushness than Garden of Words, mostly because it feels like there’s a more purposeful drive to its aimless wanderlust. This hour-long movie is broken into 3 parts of varying length, detailing a childhood romance that slowly comes undone thanks to the inevitable march of time. They move to separate towns, the distance between them grows ever wider, the letters they send grow less and less frequent, and their lives end up taking such different directions that despite finally ending up in the same city as each other once they finally grow into adults, they might as well be complete strangers. It’s a sad, winsome tale, and is rarely anything other than sad and winsome, which is its biggest stumbling block. Like I said above, without something light to bounce this darkness off of, Shinkai mostly just keeps the story chugging along at the same speed and tempo without much variation. It’s always the same degree of pining, always the same pang of sorrow, always the same earnest longing that gropes in the darkness without ever finding a light switch. There’s only so deeply this movie can worm its way into your soul when it only ever takes a single strategy to get there.

Still, for as limited as 5cm’s scope is, I can’t deny that it’s still really damn effective in spite of itself. Because where Shinkai lacks in story construction and polish, he more than makes up for in directed, intentional atmosphere. While it’s not as artistically polished as Garden of Words, there’s far more character to its particular brand of beauty, rendered in sheer, sometimes sketchy richness of hue and texture. The colors are all deep and subdued like a perpetual crimson twilight, pooling and spilling across the achingly rendered landscapes like the dying rays of a winter sun, with the pooling glow of street lights glimmering like hearth fire in the deep, cool blues of evening. I almost feel like describing this movie’s feel in colors is the only way to really capture how it makes you feel. It’s a very magenta movie, with speckles of cerulean and deep amber swaths. It’s also a stunningly vast movie; there are no shortage of landscape and sky shots that feel like direct precursors to the expansive beauty of Your Name. It all contributes to a very intentional, very intimate feeling of melancholy uncertainty, of staring into the future uncertain of where the path ahead leads. It’s quietly terrifying and deeply anxious, yet it’s also tender and trembling and majestic in its own right. It also helps that the whole story plays in large part as montage, allowing the plot a very dream-like feel that works to capture the emotions and sensations of these characters’ lives instead of their exact reality. The lack of much story action works far better in that kind of atmosphere than the alternative.

5 Centimeters per Second is no masterpiece, and it’s clear Shinkai is far better off working the full emotional spectrum than just this limited pocket. But man, even with those constraints working against him, he’s still able to back one hell of a sensory wallop when he puts his mind to it. So for the incredibly artistry, deeply affecting atmosphere, and a handful of audiovisual moments that really formed a lump in my throat, I give this film a score of:

7/10