There was a point about halfway through The Girl Who Leapt Through Time where I thought it could rival the works of Makoto Shinkai, who I obviously respect a lot as a writer, where because of her actions, because of her emotional immaturity and inability to face her close friend when he tries to ask her out, Makoto, the eponymous protagonist inadvertently pushes him away, into the arms of her friend, at which point she realises she did actually want to be with him. Of course, since the film’s premise concerns a girl leaping through time, the ability which allowed her to sidestep his advances in the first place, equally allows her to fix her mistakes, otherwise the story might have expanded on the repercussions that avoiding difficult situations can have on the people around you.

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I just watched Away from Her, a movie about an old couple where the wife has Alzheimer’s disease and the husband has to cope with her slipping away from him as she begins to forget things and eventually who he is. It was decent, but not a lot more. The whole time I was just aching for it to be somehow more beautiful, by which I mean I thought about The Place Promised in Our Early Days while I was watching Away from Her and wished Away from Her could be even half as beautiful as the representation of separation in that film.

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I got bored of animé for a while, but now I like it again, and part of the reason I like it again is that I rewatched Makoto Shinkai’s works She and Her Cat (which you can watch here), Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days (aka. Beyond the Clouds), five, thirty, and ninety minutes long respectively.

There are several aspects common to all of these, such as a relationship between a boy (or a cat) and a girl, a theme of separation and longing and getting on with life in spite of them, and a sort of intangible sentiment along the lines of “I am here / awake / alive” or, rather nicely put at the end of She and Her Cat, “this world… I think we like it.” There is also this incredible purity of vision in each of them that comes from the fact that, the first two at least, were almost exclusively the work of Shinkai who wrote, drew, animated, and voiced She and Her Cat and Voices of a Distant Star himself, with his wife providing additional voices and his friend composing the music.

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Lately I’ve been turning cold towards Japanese ‘stuff’. I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s suddenly becoming more popular and mainstream, or whether I’m just growing tired of it, but it’s just not as cool as it once was.

Take animé for example. I used to love animé: It was the first section I went to in DVD shops, I bought all the Studio Ghibli films, and I watched countless series and movies. But now I just don’t get so excited by all the visual bombast, by all the surreality or the squiggly little symbols. There’s a lot of cliché in anime films, perhaps no more than in any genre, say film noire, or romance, but the weird-for-weird’s sake, or the cool-for-cool’s sake of anime isn’t doing it for me any more. (more…)