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The Garden of Words
言の葉の庭
2013 · Film · 46 min
Directed by Makoto Shinkai
Takao, who is training to become a shoemaker, skipped school and is sketching shoes in a Japanese-style garden. He meets a mysterious woman, Yukino, who is older than him. Then, without arranging the times, the two start to see each other again and again, but only on rainy days. They deepen their relationship and open up to each other. But the end of the rainy season soon approaches.
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6 comments on Hacker News
Yeah, quite a bit. I watch anime online 1-2 times a week with some friends from high school and it's a lot of fun to chat with something we all enjoy.
I understand a lot of the comments talking about some of the pervy nature of some anime, and it's absolutely true. Usually you can tell if an anime is going to rely on that kind of stuff right from the first episode or two, and I avoid those, as they're uncomfortable to watch.
I guess the main appeals to me are that I get to see another culture (Japan) that I find very interesting and if we consider the fact that many cultures have big domestic entertainment production, they're all going to have some good content. I spend a lot of my time with the Japanese stuff (manga included) because I like a lot of the themes they touch on, but I also enjoy Indian, Korean, German, English, etc media as well. Anime just happens to be one portion of that.
To limit myself to just American media would mean I'm missing out on all the best stuff around the world.
For anyone that maybe has a dislike for anime, I'd consider watching "Garden of Words", "Your Name", "Weathering with You", or "Flavors of Youth". All are very popular films between 45 minutes and two hours that have classic coming of age stories that are common in American culture, so I'd imagine they'd be a good place to start if you wanted to give anime a shot.
It is a matter of taste of course, but, say, Makoto Shinkai's 'Garden of Words' I found a lot more visually pleasing. I know you cannot compare works from different eras, but that just highlights that today, one would watch Akira more for its history than for how it stands on its own today. In comparison, the original Blade Runner stands very well in its own right today and I would not hesitate to recommend it to someone who hasn't watched it.
Akira just didn't captivate me, and I watched it for the first time in a packed out cinema.
> I am not really a fan of the art style used in sol levante, but for something like garden of words or other styles I think 4k HDR might be quite beneficial.
I think the main point being made though is that style is far far more important that resolution. I would rather watch a good style at low resolution, than whatever this style was at 4K. Another way of looking at it is that 4K/HDR won't magically make your content look better if it has uninteresting style.
This is true in other mediums too. You can have a game with hyper realistic graphics like the newest CoD, but some indie game with gorgeous art direction will still look visually better.
Now, you could argue, why not both, great style and resolution! Well that could be, but from what I gathered from the blog, it seems like many of the artistic decisions were driven and constrained by their goal of having 4k/HDR content, so it seems like trying to achieve that has negatively impacted the art style. So yes, as it is, I'm happy sticking to non-4K anime.
This whole thing is also a big promotion for Netflix "technology", with behind-the-scene videos that are longer than the "movie" itself. So I'm not sure how much you can really derive from this whole thing.
To quote bitwize from this thread: Well-done anime has a way of focusing on the mundane in order to establish an emotional connection to the setting.
For anyone who wants to understand this aesthetic, I strongly recommend watching The Garden of Words (言の葉の庭), which is only 46 minutes long. There is something breathtakingly beautiful about this film and other ones like it. They engender a strong feeling of longing and gentle sadness (nostalgia?) by bringing focus to the little things in life. It's a sentiment that tugs at the human soul.
Look up mono no aware (物の哀れ), which may be translated as 'a gentle sadness at the transience of things', as well as wabi-sabi (侘寂). Both of these are central to Japanese culture and history.
Edit: I also recommend checking out '5 Centimeters Per Second' and 'Your Name', both directed by Makoto Shinkai. To quote Ronnie Scheib's review:
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.
Some images from 5cm/s: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=5+cm+per+second&oq=5+cm+per+second
> I've never really developed a taste for Japanese animation, and went in with no expectations.
To be fair, the vast majority of it is crap. (In much the same way the majority of American entertainment content is also crap)
But there's also fantastic stuff out there, like Miyazaki films.
Makoto Shinkai has some excellent films.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Shinkai
Garden of Words, 5 Centimeters Per Second, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, The Place Promised in our Early Days, and Voices of a Distant Star are all excellent.
Mamoru Hosoda's recent works have all been quite good as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamoru_Hosoda
I'm not really a fan of his earlier works, but everything he's done since The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has been very high caliber.
I wouldn't say either is quite at the level of Miyazaki and Ghibli, but they're both quite good, and some of the better examples of the medium at it's best.
Miyazaki/Ghibli stand apart from the rest of the anime industry. Their sensibilities are both out of sync with the film and TV output of other companies[1], different from mainstream manga; yet when they put something out, the world watches. I think it stems from Miyazaki's unique outlook, which seems far less influenced by pop culture but instead hews to the dreams, whimsy, and imagination of children. It's less "modern", more "storybook", and that makes his films unique and widely appealing.
That's not to say there aren't other anime film directors who have put out impressive work:
- Satoshi Kon (a visionary sadly deceased, a true loss to the world)
- Makoto Shinkai (purveyor of the most beautiful animated scenes to exist[2])
- Mamoru Hosoda (works naturalistic yet fantastical, grounded in family and the real world)
All three have been labelled "the new Miyazaki" or compared to him.
Finally, since people are posting recommendations of Miyazaki's work:
On Your Mark, a 6-minute animated music video, is the sort of thing that you watch once and remember years down the road as a strange memory, a sci-fi short story from your teenage years. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1yx4sf_hayao-miyazaki-s-on-your-mark_music
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[1] In fact, Miyazaki has criticized the anime industry for being too full of people who don't observe other people, resulting in works that don't resonate with a wider audience; it's anime by anime geeks for anime geeks, full of stereotypes and a culture unto itself. That's why directors like Satoshi Kon and Shinichiro Watanabe are so needed, who paint rounded, real characters who're accessible to a wider audience. Discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1wltx5/miyazaki_the_problem_with_the_anime_industry_is/cf36y3m
[2] Shinkai's most recent work is The Garden of Words, a lush feast for the eyes which might as well have been titled The Garden of Wallpapers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTTRweJ7jVs