In 1999 the young animator Makoto Shinkai single-handedly wrote, directed and illustrated a five-minute animated short titled She and her Cat. It was widely acclaimed, won a few awards, and led to Shinkai getting funding to write and direct a slightly longer piece. Voices of a Distant Star was a fantastic extended short – it runs for 25 minutes – and saw Shinkai widely heralded as the next big creative force in the Japanese animation scene. It has now been 25 years, and Shinkai has predictably emerged as one of the most popular voices in anime. His features have included the likes of Your Name (2016), Weathering with You (2019), and Suzume (2022).

For a time it seemed as if everyone wanted Makoto Shinkai to be the next Hayao Miyazaki, with an enormous amount of critical pressure placed on his early full-length features The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004) and Five Centimetres a Second (2007). Now, thankfully, it seems everyone is happy for him to instead present his own deeply personal and unique aesthetic. I think Shinkai’s works, and the anime landscape in general, have been all the richer for it.

Easy to miss in the wake of his recent, record-breaking works is The Garden of Words (2013). It is an odd length at 46 minutes; too long to give the quick, sharp hit of a short film, and too short to fully expand to the depth of a proper feature. One the other hand it seems the perfect length for Makoto Shinkai, and it showcases his particular, and particularly Japanese, artistic strengths. While commercial realities make it unlikely for him to ever abandon full-length works, I do hope he can find time for more short features in the years to come.

The premise: Akizuki (Miyu Irino) is a 15 year-old Tokyo high schooler who skips school to visit the Shinjuku Gyoen’s Japanese garden. While there he meets a 27 year-old woman named Yukino (Kana Hanazawa). She appears to be skipping work in order to drink beer and eat chocolate. The two make a connection, and the story develops from there.

There is a stillness and a subtlety to Shinkai’s works, and that is in full effect here. This calm, deliberate quality, which is prevalent in many anime productions, closely reflects the aesthetic of classical Japanese cinema. Often this kind of effect is taken for cost reasons: it’s cheaper to animate a film if lots of the shots are effectively still images. For all I know that’s the case here as well, but Shinkai has written a script that does actually demand these moments. Like much of Japanese cinema it’s filled with ellipsis; one of the reasons Shinkai can squeeze the story into 46 minutes is because he only gives us enough action to extrapolate the plot for ourselves. It is written a love story, but it’s an oddly idiosyncratic, thoughtful one. Akizuki is 15. The woman he meets, Yukino, is 27. Clearly there is not going to be a romance between them. What there is instead is part meditation, part elegy. There’s a lot of sadness here, which underlies the entire film.

The animation has been produced using a surprisingly smooth blend of hand-drawn art, computer graphic and rotoscoping (animation over live-action photography). It ultimately makes The Garden of Words one of those animated films where there’s ostensibly no real reason for it to be animated at all. I’m glad it is, however, as Shinkai has a beautiful aesthetic that would be impossible to replicate in live-action. He draws excellent performances out of his two leads as well, particularly Miyu Irino as the troubled, complicated Yukino.

This is just a lovely film: small, well-written, sensitively performed and visually marvellous. It was also a treat to see Shinkai’s representation of Shinjuku Gyoen; I was there some years ago and it’s a beautiful park.