It’s little hard to make out in that image, but it’s the box on the left.

I’ve been procrastinating over watch 5cm for a little while now, but it ended up working out for the best – I had the opportunity to watch it on a 50″ screen instead of my usual 32″. It’s definitely the way to watch it – on as big and high quality a screen as possible. The animation is pretty outstanding, particularly the use of light and shadow which has pretty much become Shinkais trademark. It’s hard not to be impressed when they throw around so many of the kind of light effects that you don’t see much of in anime due to difficulty in achieving it.

That said, I wasn’t really all that enamoured with the content. Sure, I was impressed by the candid realism of the ending, but otherwise it was only really the second of the three segments which I found particularly endearing – the first segment, essentially an extended monologue, started to grate on me after a while, whilst the musical montage the third built up to did nothing for me (it probably didn’t help that I didn’t really like the song).

Ultimately, The Place Promised is the only Shinkai work that I’ve really loved thus far. I really need to get around to re-watching that…