Despite my unhealthy rewatch count for 5 Centimeters per Second, I find it a difficult recommendation, primarily due to the utter lack of conventional drama. There is no confrontation, no villain, no reckoning, just a linear collage of mundane events driven by unavoidable departures and unspoken feelings that are arguably lamentable, but in no way tragic. You have to decide yourself whether that’s the message — the elemental power of mundanity to cause grief like a dull instrument — or a genuine limitation of the storytelling.
There is a serendipitous symmetry in having first watched the anime at the protagonists’ age at the story’s beginning, and now rewatching this adaptation at their age at the end. I couldn’t help but wonder what I had felt watching the original anime in my early teens, and why I was so impressed that I felt almost compelled to go see this adaptation. But I could not remember. Maybe it’s just rose-colored nostalgia. Or maybe, as the protagonist herself suggests, that’s the formative residue of an early age at work.
The movie adaptation does a decent job of extending and rearranging the source material, though it feels stretched thin in places. The “clever” coincidences introduced feel artificial at best, awkward at worst. (Perhaps the story is simply too spare to bear further expansion.) Still, the effort to rebuild those scenes manages to evoke the days of watching and rewatching the only video on a portable player, the one that had taken hours to download.
