5 Centimeters per Second

5 Centimeters per Second (2007) runs sixty three minutes and comes in three parts. The title is the speed at which a cherry blossom petal falls. Part one: Takaki and Akari are close friends in primary school. Their families move to different cities and they start writing letters. One winter Takaki takes a train to see her and the snow delays it for hours. That journey is the best section of the film. Part two shifts to another girl's point of view, and we see that Takaki has moved to a distant island and is still writing messages to someone he does not send. Part three takes place in adulthood and is built almost entirely on one song, Masayoshi Yamazaki's One More Time, One More Chance. Makoto Shinkai's later films, Your Name included, keep working the same idea: two people and the distance between them. In this one the distance does not close and Shinkai rescues nobody. The ending has been argued about for years; some call it his most honest, others say it punishes the audience. The detail in the backgrounds was extraordinary for 2007, and the snow on the station platform is still cited as a reference. It runs 63 minutes. Good for: anime, quiet drama, and stories about first love. Less good for: there is almost no plot, the pace is very slow, and the ending is deliberately unsatisfying.