![]() Probably because of Shinkai’s interests combined with his film’s barely-over-an-hour runtime, the original’s focus was acute. ![]() (Caveat: I was also fine with the conclusion of John Sayles 1999 film Limbo, whose ending was booed in my audience.) That said, Seike’s version is the more mature work and its length and heavy use of dialogue allow it to explore the implications of Shinkai’s world a bit more insightfully. I thought his ending was natural to the story he was telling. I am one of those who appreciated what I imagined Shinkai to be saying with his mostly downbeat 1 1 There’s a bare trickle of hope in the final frames of the film, though not enough to overwhelm the far greater sense of loss. While Seike doesn’t obliterate Shinkai’s original conclusion, she does offer something more satisfying (at least to Western readers who delight in loose ends being tied and clipped). While my wife might not ever want to see the film again, I’m certain she wouldn’t put it out of the realm of possibility that she might return to the book. With all of her additions, Seike’s adaptation strikes an entirely different vibe and its tonal difference is dramatic. And where Shinkai’s original ends in three chapters, Seike’s creates an entire additional fourth chapter, moving Shinkai’s world well beyond it’s original purpose. Takaki’s girlfriend has enough dialogue to make the dissolution of their relationship mean something-and we actually bear witness to that dissolution. Her sense for a story that either was only hinted at in the source or even didn’t exist at all is robust. Seike takes Shinkai’s rather terse script and expands on it… expansively. Kind of like comparing James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans with Michael Mann’s. ![]() In truth, while sharing a foundation, the two are very different literary artifacts. Because as good as Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters is (and it is good), Seike’s 5 Centimeters is better. Yukiko Seike’s adaptation acquits itself on all points. And then, lastly, I wasn’t sure I was in the mood to watch people engage in romantic suffering. Part of the power of Shinkai’s film comes from its staccato barrage of imagery, something impossible to adequately simulate in comics. Beyond the fact that adaptations from other mediums into comics rarely fair that well, any adaptation of Shinkai’s film would have to navigate his reliance upon scene-to-scene and aspect-to-aspect cut. When I saw that Vertical had released an adaptation of the film, I was initially skeptical. Kind of like me and Grave of the Fireflies. My wife thought it was a good film that she never really wants to see again. It’s good and powerful and most viewers I hear from don’t actually like the movie. His film charts a love’s gradual evolution into void through three segments. For all its awkwardness, for its sliver of a resolution, for its refusal to offer satisfaction-for all of that, I appreciated Shinkai for telling a story I could believe in. My emotions overcame my reason-which only would have mattered if I knew what I was doing.įor this reason, me being part of the broken human race and being smart and being stupid and being filled with love and distrust and kindness and anger-for this reason, watching Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters per Second was a resonating experience. I hurt people and was hurt by other people. And in those decades when I was trying to figure it out-trying to make friends and find love-I screwed things up often, badly, and often badly. ![]() While I personally have at last settled into a comfortable kind of success on the interpersonal front, it took a while. Which is, of course, funny when one considers just how naturally social we are, as a people. And when you add to that the volatile mix of emotions and hormones, it becomes flatly miraculous that any of us can lay claim to even a modicum of success when it comes to Being Around People. And everything that attempts to mark out the boundaries and admonish a sort of Best Practice approach to the world of humanity is just some arrogant SOB’s shot in the dark based off what worked for her or him. Human interaction, this whole member of society thing, is hard. ![]()
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