Anime Review: The Garden of Words

The term "Koi" refers to the Japanese sense of love.

That is how director Makoto Shinkai describes The Garden of Words. An exploration of Koi.

The Garden of Words isn't a film that operates by the Western standard of romance. It brings together the concepts of a romance film but one that is enveloped in the meaning of Koi.

The story of Garden of Words is between high school student Takao Akizuki and his high school teacher Yukari Yukino. The story of "Koi" means to "long for someone in solitude, or lonely sadness". Which is precisely what this film is. In 45 minutes, The Garden of Words shows us the meaning of Koi and makes us feel a Koi of our own while doing so.

The two of them (Takao and Yukari) long for human touch. For companionship. Someone to talk to, someone to listen and even someone to call a friend.

The Tanka in this video is the breath of the film. The very essence of its being. A Tanka, a form of Japanese literature and poetry, in this particular instance reminds us of the rain in the film. A form of symbolism that can't be denied. The rain brought them together, and they accept that.

The types of anime being put out today border on the derivativeness of reproducing the same shows and types of content over and over again. That to me is the Achilles heel of the entire industry because it simply offers no opportunity to grow and experiment with new and interesting stories that might or might not work. The loss is in the fact that we'll never know.

The Garden of Words in that respect still does utilise some of the tropes of popular anime culture, which is fine because it doesn't make them the centre of the story and instead chooses to focus more on the grounded concerns of humanity and romance instead of looking to the stars for overly-fantasy-like solutions like almost every other anime does.

My rating for this anime stands at a more than-strong, 9 out of 10.

What Makoto Shinkai has accomplished here with this film, is the very reason anime can indeed be a force for further developing the art of storytelling by showing things in a way that live-action films simply cannot.

Do you think many anime now feel and look the same? Does it seem to you that the anime you see feels familiar on some level or another? What would you suggest is the best way for the anime industry to go forward? Comment below!