Byousoku 5 Centimeter Wallpaper

…I’ve been waiting desperately for a subbed version of the next 2 episodes of Byousoku 5 Centimeter to come out, especially after reading Cardcaptor’s review of them. Click that if you like spoilers. *laugh* I love them. (Update 17/08/2007 – episode 2 and 3 are available for viewing already! Subbed!) My reading style usually ends up with peeks in the middle, at the end, and here and there in between – if I hated the beginning, I look ahead to see if it’s worth struggling through the initial boredom, and if I’m totally hooked, I look ahead anyway because temptation is my worst enemy and patience my worst ally. Anyway, here’s another link, to the Makoto Shinkai Fan Website, or more precisely, the Byousoku 5 Cm website. There are briefer summaries of the next 2 episodes on that.

And here, we have the official Japanese site’s download page, which has several exceedingly pretty wallpapers for download. Just looking at that page you can tell Byousoku is a very introspective kind of movie – screenshots of a snowy night almost eclipsing the faint lights of a moving train, a solitary figure sitting on a bench as dawn arrives, countryscapes, cityscapes, all so empty and ever so beautiful… *melancholy sigh* There are wallpapers for what looks like another, different, anime there; also by Makoto Shinkai, called The Place Promised in Our Early Days in English, Kumo no Muko, Yakusoku no Basho (Beyond the Clouds, the Promised Place) in Japanese. I’ve wanted to watch that for a while now, and I shall one day. *yosh!*

I really like short anime like these; it’s like reading short stories. They’re extremely hard to make or write – how can you make something so short have the same or greater impact than longer, fully fledged series or novels? How can you impart the same theme so effectively? …Thing is, they do, and sometimes more effectively than their longer counterparts. Short stories have this way of persisting in your memory as well, that novels don’t; you don’t always remember every event in a novel, and not every quote or action you read is essential and pregnant with meaning, but in a short story, everything is important. The tea cosy on the table, the half smile on that lady’s face, the passing thought in the corner of the page that might belong to the narrator, all of it is important, because the writer only has so many words to express exactly what he or she is getting at. And it’s the same for anime: the shorter it is, the more essential each spoken word, each scene change, is. Take the beginning of Oukashou, for example, if you missed the explanation of what 5 Centimeters per Second refers to, you’ve missed a lot of the anime. The idea of cherry blossoms falling. It’s so…irreversible, so slow, and so beautiful.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)