The Garden of Words (2013) on Netflix
TV-14201346mAnimationDramaRomance
Takao Akizuki, fifteen and hoping to become a shoemaker, skips class on rainy mornings to draw shoes in a Tokyo park. There he meets Yukari Yukino, a twenty-seven-year-old woman avoiding work.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.4/1061,535 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
At the start of the rainy season in Tokyo, Takao Akizuki, a fifteen-year-old student who wants to become a shoemaker, skips his first class and draws shoes in the garden of Shinjuku Gyoen. There he meets Yukari Yukino, a twenty-seven-year-old woman who has stayed away from her job and is eating chocolate and drinking beer. She sees the school crest on his uniform and parts from him with a tanka, a kind of Japanese poem. Neither gives a name. They meet again in the park on rainy mornings, and their talk turns to his shoemaking.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Garden of Words (2013)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Makoto Shinkai, who had lived in Shinjuku for ten years, modeled the film's garden on Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden and took thousands of photos to build his storyboards; after the March 2011 earthquake he worried the real garden could be destroyed and wanted to preserve it in animation.
- Half of the film's backgrounds were made from Shinkai's own photographs, drawn over in Adobe Photoshop, while the other half were fictional settings created with traditional animation and computer graphics.
- For the characters, Shinkai's team used a novel coloring method that integrated each character's coloring with the background to mimic the refraction of light on skin in nature, by coloring the character's outline and working the background color into the surface.
- Shinkai cast Kana Hanazawa as Yukari despite her unusually low natural voice, after days of listening to audition tapes; she typically played high-pitched younger girls, and he was impressed by her broad range of expression.
- The film's final crying scene, recorded perfectly on the first take, decided Miyu Irino's casting as Takao: Shinkai believed only Irino could produce the intense emotion the closing scene needed.
- Composer Daisuke Kashiwa had been a fan of Shinkai's 5 Centimeters Per Second and sent him several albums; Shinkai listened to them while writing the screenplay and based the film's score on Kashiwa's album 88.
- The theme song "Rain" was written and composed by Senri Oe as a popular 1988 Japanese song that Shinkai listened to while at university; it was remade for the film in 2013 and sung by Motohiro Hata.
- When Shinkai first presented the story to his team, they found Yukari unintentionally came across as selfish, so he gave her nervous traits and personality flaws, such as letting her emotions spill over at mildly upsetting events.
