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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

5 centimeters per second

A Sky Longing for Memories: The Art of Makoto Shinkai

July 17, 2015 by Ash Brown

A Sky Longing for MemoriesCreator: Makoto Shinkai
Translator: Maya Rosewood
U.S. publisher: Vertical
ISBN: 9781941220436
Released: June 2015
Original release: 2008

I was introduced to the work of Makoto Shinkai through his animated film 5 Centimeters per Second, which left a huge impression on me. The beautifully melancholic story about lost and unrequited love was simple enough, but the visuals were stunningly gorgeous. A Sky Longing for Memories: The Art of Makoto Shinkai is an artbook that was originally released in Japan in 2008, the year after 5 Centimeters per Second debuted. I was very pleased when Vertical Comics announced its intention to publish an English-language edition. That volume was ultimately released in 2015 with a translation by Maya Rosewood. Vertical hasn’t released very many artbooks, but A Sky Longing for Memories is a good fit for the publisher. Not only has Vertical published other nonfiction works about Japanese film, it has also released two Shinkai manga: 5 Centimeters per Second and The Garden of Words.

A Sky Longing for Memories primarily consists of stills and background artwork from four of Shinkai’s projects initially released between 2002 and 2007. Prominently featured are three of his animated films—5 Centimeters Per Second, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, and Voices of a Distant Star—as is the television commercial he created for Shinano Mainichi Shimbun, “Say Something Important.” More than half of A Sky Longing for Memories is devoted to 5 Centimeters Per Second, the volume opening with some of Shinkai’s most visually refined and impressive work. The three sections that follow are dedicated to each of the earlier films and “Say Something Important.” Also included in the volume is a glossary—useful for readers who are unfamiliar with some of the technical terms used in the animation industry—as well as “Makoto Shikai’s Colors,” a section exploring the methods and techniques used by Shinkai, and “Testimonials of Makoto Shinkai’s World,” a collection of brief interviews with Shinkai and ten other members of Shinkai Works.

Although A Sky Longing for Memories can simply be appreciated and enjoyed as a collection of stunning artwork, the volume also provides insight into the creative processes and artistic direction required to achieve such impressive images. Many of the individual pieces are accompanied by brief descriptions of the decisions that were made in their overall design in addition to the specific considerations and techniques used in their creation. It’s unclear who actually wrote much of the text in A Sky Longing for Memories, but from the context it would seem to either be one (or several) of Shikai’s staff members or someone else who was close to the work being done. Either way, I was glad for the inclusion of the various descriptions and explanations; I don’t have a strong background in visual art or design and so found A Sky Longing for Memories to be illuminating and intellectually stimulating as well as beautiful to look at.

One of the key components of Shinkai’s style is his use of color. With this in mind, Vertical has taken great care to faithfully reproduce Shinkai’s artwork in A Sky Longing for Memories; the volume uses thick, glossy paper on which the colors in particular are beautifully presented. Simply put, it’s a gorgeous book of gorgeous illustrations. A Sky Longing for Memories reveals Shinkai not only as a talented artist but also as a skilled director. While he solely handled almost every aspect of Voices of a Distant Star except for the film’s music, by the time 5 Centimeters per Second was produced Shinkai was guiding and coordinating the work of an entire staff. Interestingly, most of the team members were traditionally trained artists from outside of the animation industry who had to learn digital techniques and illustration methods on the job. As can be seen from A Sky Longing for Memories, the result of their combined efforts is spectacular.

Filed Under: REVIEWS Tagged With: 5 centimeters per second, anime, Artbooks, makoto shinkai, Nonfiction, vertical, Vertical Comics

Off the Shelf: Gods, Wine, & Time

July 5, 2012 by MJ and Michelle Smith Leave a Comment

MJ: I’m late. I’m late. For a very important date.

MICHELLE: I wonder if I could take this as a hint that you’ve finally read something I’ve been wanting you to read?

MJ: Hmmmm, I suspect the answer to that is “no.” I’m pretty sure I first encountered this as a small child, in Alice in Wonderland. And then a little later on a Barbra Streisand album.

MICHELLE: Oh, darn. I was hoping you’d read some of Alice in the Country of Hearts! Oh well. What did you read?

MJ: Well, my first read this week was Aki’s Olympos, a new josei single-volume omnibus release from Yen Press.

Olympos tells the story of Ganymede of Troy, said to have been abducted by Zeus and brought to serve him at Mount Olympus. In Aki’s adaptation, it is actually Zeus’s son Apollo who abducts Ganymede and holds him in the “miniature garden,” a prison filled with white flower petals as immortal as the gods themselves. Rather than occupying a position of honor as cupbearer to the gods as in the original myths, Aki’s Ganymede is relentlessly tortured by Apollo, who presses upon him the bleakness of his new immortality and takes pleasure in his futile attempts to escape. This torture is later escalated by Hades, who informs Ganymede that his only chance for relief would be for him to go mad, which would release him from Zeus’ celestial realm and into the dark of the underworld. Meanwhile, an eerily monstrous specter of Zeus hovers menacingly around the garden, infatuated with its human prisoner.

I’ve painted a pretty grim picture, I know, so you may be surprised to hear that Olympos is actually a fairly quiet, philosophical manga, meandering through its 300+ pages with musings on the nature of truth and immortality, and the impossibility of understanding between humans and gods. Unfortunately, “meandering” is a key word here. Despite a strong beginning, featuring a newly captured human (Heinz), charged by Apollo with the daunting task of convincing Ganymede—after years of Apollo’s goading—that escape from the garden is possible after all, the series soon loses focus, devolving into a kind of distractedly philosophical pudding that never quite gels.

That said, there’s a lot worth fishing out of this mythological goo if one has the will to do so, and I admit to enjoying quite a bit of it. Apollo’s journey is interesting in particular, as he comes to the realization that speaking the truth and knowing the truth are not necessarily the same things. Ganymede’s character, too, has a lot to offer, as he slowly comes to terms with his fate. Ganymede is described by Homer as the most beautiful of mortals, and this aspect of his story is one that Aki truly takes to heart. All of the artwork in Olympos is beautiful, in fact, almost beautiful enough to make up for its structural flaws.

MICHELLE: I have to say, “distractedly philosophical pudding” is a wonderful phrase, and one that could be applied to quite a lot of storytelling, in my experience.

And yes, despite its flaws, Olympos still sounds like something I’m going to want to check out. Especially because it’s josei and we see too little of that here.

MJ: I do think you’ll want to check it out. And though I think you’re likely to become frustrated with its lack of coherency at some points, I think you’ll end up enjoying it. I certainly did.

So, what have you been reading this week?

MICHELLE: First up for me is volume four of The Drops of God, a seinen series about wine that’s published by Vertical in two-in-one omnibus editions.

This series… how to describe it. My first compulsion is to say “It’s like Oishinbo with wine.” The protagonist, Shizuku Kanzaki, was never a wine fan while his father, a famous wine critic, was alive, but after his death, Shizuku becomes obsessed with learning about the stuff, which is fortunate because the terms of his father’s will require him to compete with a prententious critic (Issei Tomine) to identify a dozen or so wines based on verbal descriptions alone. In between the match-ups with Issei (the second of which closes out this volume), Shizuku and his trusty sidekick Miyabi get up to various things, which usually involve tasting a whole bunch of wine and rhapsodizing about them, sometimes with unintentionally amusing visuals and dialogue.

For instance, in this volume, the wine division of Taiyo Beer has a new client who turns out to be Miyabi’s first love from middle school. He wants to open a grocery store that stocks only name-brand wines, and it’s up to Shizuku and Miyabi to convince him that there are many worthy wines without a prestige name, and so they must search out and find certain ones capable of besting famous wines in a testing. Of course, they succeed, culminating in an absolutely hilarious scene where the first love guy takes a sip and is suddenly riding a pegasus amongst the clouds, taking a little tour of his childhood memories. I admit I laughed out loud.

I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t like The Drops of God, because I do, but it frequently strikes me as ridiculous, even more than your average sports manga (but not more so than the latter volumes of The Prince of Tennis). Perhaps it would help if I had a genuine interest in wine.

I do want to note that this volume has a special message in the back, which I’ll quote here: “The unveiling of the Second Apostle concludes “season one” of the English release. By author request, our next installment jumps ahead in the storyline to a segment on “New World” wines including those in Napa Valley. Tell all your friends about the series so there will be second and third seasons to fill in the gap! We appreciate your support.”

So now I am doing my part by telling all the folks reading Off the Shelf!

MJ: Important news indeed, Michelle! I, too, like The Drops of God, probably more than most sports manga, though that may simply be due to the fact that I have much more interest (generally) in wine than sports. I’m behind on this series, but I’m anxious to catch up. It’s just, well, fun. Also, it makes me thirsty.

MICHELLE: Yeah, it does kind of have that effect.

So, the last book that we’re going to discuss is one that we’ve both read, but we’re coming at it from slightly different perspectives. That is, you’ve seen the movie that it’s based on and I haven’t.

MJ: Indeed! It’s one of my favorite movies, even.

MICHELLE: What we’re talking about is 5 Centimeters per Second, another two-in-one omnibus from Vertical, though this time collecting the entire series. Do you want to describe the story, or shall I?

MJ: I can at least start! Based on the animated feature from writer/director Makoto Shinkai, 5 Centimeters per Second tells the story of a young boy, Takaki Tohno, and Akari Shinohara, the first love he can’t put behind him. He first meets Akari as she transfers into his elementary school in Tokyo. The two bond quickly, partly due to their mutual experience as children whose families move a lot. Mostly, though, they just like each other, so much so that their classmates eventually tease them about being in love. With middle school quickly approaching, they work hard to get into the same junior high, but just like that, Akari’s family is moving again, to Iwafune, quite a distance away.

The two keep in touch by mail, but when Takaki finds out that his family is going to be moving even further away, he decides to visit Akari by train while he still can. Rushing from school to the train, he is delayed several hours by a snowstorm, finally arriving in Iwafune late into the night to find Akari waiting hopefully at the station. This is the last time he will ever meet with her. Time passes, and with only letters and text messages to connect them, Takaki and Akari eventually grow apart. But Takaki’s lingering attachment keeps him from really being able to connect with anyone else.

MICHELLE: (This is spoiler territory here, so be warned.)

I really love how this story plays out because, unfamiliar with the movie, I kept expecting Takaki and Akari to reunite, especially since the opening pages portray them passing each other in the street. But it’s actually much more complicated than that, as the realities of day-to-day adult life have whittled down Takaki’s idealism to the point where he feels he has lost his real self. He never really put forth the effort to contact Akari—another character, Kanae, later shows that one can find someone if one really tries—but yet to move on, to really love someone else would feel like a betrayal. And so he is stuck.

And then at the end, we revisit the moment they glimpse each other, which is portrayed fairly ambiguously from Akari’s point of view. Did she notice him? Did she recognize him? I tend to think she did not, and I love how Takaki smiles at that realization—always kind, he is relieved to see that she’s moved on (did he notice her engagement ring?) and is not encumbered by memories of him as he has been with her. It’s sad, but it’s nice, and I love that it doesn’t go for the expected happy ending.

MJ: This kind of inevitable separation—both the pain of it and the cruel ordinariness of it—is a recurring theme in Shinkai’s work (you may remember that the manga adaptation of one of his earliest films, The Voices of a Distant Star, was the first review I wrote for PopCultureShock), and though he’s always explored this theme beautifully, 5 Centimeters per Second is his most poignant attempt, I think, because the barrier between Takaki and Akari is relatively small. They aren’t separated by light years like the characters in Voices. They’re on the same planet—even in the same country. But the reality is, of course, that there is so much more to it than just the distance, and it’s this kind of simple, simple truth that makes Takaki’s plight so sad and so relatable.

MICHELLE: While the title technically refers to the speed at which a cherry blossom petal falls from a tree, it rather elegantly captures the main obstacles facing Takaki and Akari: distance and time. But it’s a fall, and a separation, that feels almost leisurely because it takes place over a long span of time.

MJ: Beautifully said, Michelle! One of the interesting things about this adaptation is just how much more leisurely the time does pass. The film is fairly neatly divided into three parts, with the first section (Takaki’s childhood with Akari, up through the point when he visits her in Iwafune) feeling the longest and the most fleshed-out. In this manga series, the second two sections are greatly expanded upon, giving us a much closer look at the stories of both Kanae and Takaki’s later girlfriend, Risa, (who is barely seen in the film), which ultimately teaches us even more about Takaki and the women he’s unintentionally hurt with his kindness over the years. While I do miss the strength of some of the film’s imagery and direction (Takaki’s lonely train ride, for instance, feels absolutely epic in the film, thanks to Shinkai’s brilliant pacing), these additional insights really do add something significant.

MICHELLE: I thought his train ride seemed pretty epic in print, too, especially given the fact that a lot of what happens prior to that is, like, two-page vignettes charting the progress of his growing closeness with Akari, but the train ride was the first time we got a long, tense, interrupted sequence of events.

I did want to ask you… was anything different in the movie? Like, the plot? I’m kind of sad to learn Kanae’s not in it much, since I liked her a great deal, and especially appreciated the little optimistic twist (but yet still ambiguous) thrown our way at the end concerning her future.

MJ: Ah, I think I perhaps wasn’t clear. Kanae is in the film quite a bit (the entire second section revolves around her). It’s Risa we barely see. But even so, there isn’t actually any difference in the plot, it’s just that we’re shown much, much more of it in the manga.

MICHELLE: Well, that makes me happy, then!

MJ: It makes me happy, too. Good adaptations can be difficult to come by, but this one is quite good indeed.

Filed Under: OFF THE SHELF Tagged With: 5 centimeters per second, olympos, The Drops of God

My Week in Manga: December 5-December 11, 2011

December 12, 2011 by Ash Brown

My News and Reviews

Last week I posted December’s first in-depth manga review: Breathe Deeply by wife and husband creative team Doton Yamaaki. It’s the second manga to be published by One Peace Books. I quite enjoyed it and look forward to future manga releases by the publisher. I also posted the Give Me Some Gin Tama! Winner. The entry also includes a great list of recommended manga titles to make you laugh. And finally, apologies for the exceptionally brief news section this week! I’m still trying to get back into the groove of things after whatever bizarre illness I had.

Quick Takes

The Beautiful Skies of Houou High, Volume 1 by Arata Aki. I’m not as offended by The Beautiful Skies of Houou High as I know some people are, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed the first volume of the manga, either. Kei Saeba, who literally gets sick in the presence of men, has been enrolled in a prestigious all-boys school by her mother after being dumped by her girlfriend in order to “fix” her daughters preferences. Even worse than that, if anyone discovers that she’s a girl while attending the school, Kei will find herself “disappeared.” I like that Kei likes girls; I like her bifauxnen character design. But that’s most of what I like about the manga. I’m not really enjoying the actual story at this point.

Dragon Girl, Omnibus 1 (equivalent to Volumes 1-3) by Toru Fujieda. Rinna Aizen’s dream is to lead Shoryu Senior High School’s ōendan, or cheering squad (not to be confused with a cheerleading squad). Fortunately for her, the all-boys school has recently gone co-ed. Nothing really stood out for me about Dragon Girl. Rinna and her friends are likeable enough, but the manga uses so many cliches and doesn’t do anything new with them that I actually found it to be rather boring. Long lost childhood love interest? Check. Evil student council? Check. (I could keep going, but I won’t.) However, I would like to thank Fujieda for introducing me to ōendan. That’s some cool stuff right there.

Megatokyo, Volumes 1-3 by Fred Gallagher and Rodney Caston. Megatokyo is a webcomic that began way back in 2000 and is still going. (You can read it here.) Personally, I prefer reading Megatokyo in print. I’ve been following Megatokyo for quite some time, but it’s been a while since I’ve gone back to the beginning. I now realize how many of the Japanese pop culture references went completely over my head the first time I read the comic. I get them now, but even if you don’t, Megatokyo is still great entertainment. Gallagher actually lives in the next town over from me and I’ve even met him on a couple of occasions. I like supporting local creators, which is yet another reason I appreciate Megatokyo.

Saihôshi: The Guardian Omnibus by Kôsen. Saihôshi is probably my favorite publication by Yaoi Press that I’ve read so far. Sure, there is plenty ridiculous about the comic, including odd clothing design choices, gratuitous magic tattoos, and one of the main character’s weapon of choice is basically a giant pair of scissors, but to me that is part of its charm. I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not, though. There are a few brief sex scenes, but Saihôshi‘s focus is on the story. Many of the fantasy elements used are fairly typical, but the plot is actually pretty decent. There was more humor in Saihôshi than I was expecting, too. High art it is not, but I honestly enjoyed Saihôshi. Kôsen is a two-person creative team from Spain made up of Aurora García Tejado and Diana Fernández.

5 Centimeters Per Second directed by Makoto Shinkai. 5 Centimeters Per Second is a gorgeous film. The animation is beautiful and frequently breathtaking—the snow, the rain, the sky, the cherry blossoms, the color and lighting, everything. The film is just over an hour long and consists of three shorts with Takaki Tōno at their heart: “Cherry Blossom,” “Cosmonaut,” and “5 Centimeters Per Second.” 5 Centimeters Per Second is suffused with melancholy and loneliness as its characters deal with intense emotions of love, longing, and loss. Be warned, if you’re looking for resolution and closure, you won’t find it here. 5 Centimeters Per Second left quite an impression on me; I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.

Filed Under: My Week in Manga Tagged With: 5 centimeters per second, anime, Arata Aki, Beautiful Skies of Houou High, comics, dragon girl, Fred Gallagher, Kôsen, makoto shinkai, manga, Megatokyo, Rodney Caston, Saihôshi, Toru Fujieda

Free time? What?

February 24, 2009 by MJ 17 Comments

With my review schedule finally under control, I actually have some time to read some things to talk about here, but I’m having a hard time deciding what to start with. I have volume 1 of Two Flowers for the Dragon sitting here looking at me, as well as a number of other things. It’s been so long since I had time to read something just for pleasure, I hardly know what to do! :)

In the meantime, I’ve been looking around online, and I have a couple of links to share. First of all, Ed Sizemore posted a review today of the most recent Mechadamia journal, and I though it sounded really interesting. His review is good reading on its own, so I recommend checking it out.

Also, Gia reported at Anime Vice about Crunchyroll’s participation in the upcoming Global Shinkai Day, including the fact that they’ll be streaming (among several of his films) 5 Centimeters Per Second which is a film I love very, very much. It is the kind of fiction that makes me long to create something that could affect other people the way it affects me. If you’ve never had a chance to see it, do yourself a favor and go watch for free at Crunchyroll on February 28th!

Lastly, I think I mentioned somewhere around the New Year that I decided to let my Shonen Jump subscription expire and pick up Shojo Beat instead. I got my first issue a little while back and… I’m so glad! Not only am I enjoying more of the comics, but I also really appreciated some of the other features in the magazine. So, Bakuman aside, it seems my early shonen manga obsession really is over! I guess I really am a girl after all! ;D

Watch for a review from me in the upcoming Otaku Bookshelf column at Manga Recon. Until then, goodnight!

Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: 5 centimeters per second, anime, makoto shinkai, manga, shojo, shojo beat

5 centimeters per second

October 25, 2007 by MJ 1 Comment

I’m home sick. Have been sleeping much of the day, and watching a little anime. My husband was recently introduced to Shinkai Makoto’s Voices of a Distant Star, so over the past couple of days, he and I have been watching both that and his later film, 5 Centimeters Per Second, which for some reason is the one I have fallen for most deeply. I watched it again today, and I was again struck with such deep emotion, it was difficult not to just start all over again as soon as it had finished. …

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Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: 5 centimeters per second, anime, makoto shinkai, navel-gazing, voices of a distant star, writing

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