The Garden of Words

Makoto Shinkai is more than director here: storyboards, key animation, compositing and editing are his too. That load he puts down to the company’s small size, which let him shape the film closer to his own idea. Production ran 6 months from location scouting in Shinjuku; he built the boards from his own photographs and painted over half the backgrounds in Photoshop. The garden is modelled on Shinjuku Gyoen, which he feared might be lost after the 2011 earthquake and wanted kept in an animated film. A colouring method folds background tone into the characters’ surfaces, imitating light refracting on skin. The woman in the garden teaches classical Japanese at the boy’s own school and stays away because her students bully her; out there neither gives a name. Their link is built on 2 tanka from Book 11 of the Man’yoshu, asked and answered. Daisuke Kashiwa wrote the music, not Tenmon, who scored Shinkai’s earlier films. The film took the Theatrical Film Award at the 18th Animation Kobe. A good fit if you would rather watch two people meet on a bench and part again than see a relationship assembled, and can take a loud close. Not for viewers who find a teacher and a pupil in a romantic frame uncomfortable; the film names that boundary once and leaves it.