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I just finished watching Darker than Black season 2 and was highly unimpressed with its finale.

So I decided I need to go fix my rage and watched 5cm per second – A chain of Short stories about their distance.

After the first 5 minutes I could tell this was going to be an anime full of baww. Firstly, I am unaccustomed to anime movies nor do I care much for love stories…but I soldiered on in feeble hope that this would be good.

In a way, it was…very good…in other ways it was incredibly average.

Firstly lets talk visuals…because lets be honest, when you watch an anime movie you want it to look far superior to a weekly release anime.

Mostly, the visuals are great…when they are not they try to be stylistic to a sense…however they kinda fall short because the stylism isn’t persistent…which is annoying.

The character animation is very smooth though and stays that way which I adore. The whole movie is full of lush backgrounds with plenty of environmental effects which don’t draw from the scene at hand which is wonderful.

To sum the music up however though is to say that it simply doesn’t fit. Of all the things that disappointed me the most, it was the soundtrack. When the music appears it just doesn’t seem to meld in with the scene and thus instead of supporting the movie it detracts from it and makes some scenes hard to concentrate on.

THE STORY! Which is presumably why some people are here…some…

Basically its a story about two childhood friends Toono Takaki and Shinohara Akari who come together due to both transferring to the same school. Both Akari and Takaki are not fit for sports so spent a lot of time together in the school library with various bits and pieces of literature. At this point I think it was considered to be about 1995-1996 so cellphones for children were few and far between…why am I bringing up cellphones you ask? Well…this is why:

Akari and Takaki were split up as they moved on to different middle schools (I think about 1997) and to contact each other they would send letters a lot. Initially I was confused about why they would do this seeing as cellphones make life easy in this regard…but alas…no cellphones…or rather they weren’t popular yet.

So we watch these two childhood friends struggle to keep contact with each other until they finally meet up again and confess their love for each other.

Only to be broken up again as they moved on.

This is where the story truly starts. Takaki is very different from any other boys of his age as he moved into high school due to his strange upbringing which makes several girls fall horrendously in love with him…but he stays faithful and hopes to once again be at Akari’s side and we follow his life as he struggles daily with his lost love.

To say any more would spoil it but I will say that there is no happy ending…when I say we follow Takaki’s life, I mean that we follow his emptiness and see him fall and fall hard…it is depressing but in a weird way uplifting and makes you reflect a lot.

Anyway the movie has a rating of 8.1/10 on IMDB (at the time of writing) and I agree with an 8 easily. I cant give it any more as it is a slow-ish movie…dont watch it unless you are in a relaxed mood and are not in a hurry to waste time…this movie has to be appreciated else any meaning will be lost. Other than that, the story is strong, the characters are well focused (save for a few side characters) and the art is outstanding.

Definitely worth a watch but as I said, make sure you set aside some time so you can truly appreciate it.

I found a download link at bakabt if you want to get it, its 1.69gbs and can be found here