Trying to Cry with Anime

5 min readAug 17, 2021

I think things have been very… unsocial-ey lately. With the pandemic and the staying-at-home, it’s easy for me to feel nothing.

You wake up, you work, you binge-watch YouTube videos, then sleep. Being robotic is a routine I have and that makes me feel emotionless at times.

Thanks to that, I started a journey to look for more emotions and meanings. I decided to take that journey via watching anime.

How my journey went

Yesterday, I saw a friend sharing an Instagram story about Kimi no Na Wa. Actually, I’m not really an anime guy, but thanks to the goal I had, I was then excited to watch it.

I then fell deep into an anime rabbit hole, from Kimi no Na Wa to The Garden of Words (my favorite!).

Btw, let’s make it clear

What I aim is to share how I fell in love with the movies. I might share one or two analyses, but it’s far from properly reviewing them. So there won’t be an in-depth analysis going forward.

What I’ve watched

I have watched 4 of Shinkai’s movies so far. These are ranked from my most favorite to the least:

Minor spoilers for no 1 and 2.

Why did I decide to watch the movies? Didn’t I say I’m not an anime guy?

I am okay with anime actually. I am just selective on what I choose to watch.

So since I was looking for emotions and meanings, I wanted something that can make me cry. Hence, Kimi no Na Wa, the notorious tearjerker of Japanese pop culture. Probably 10 out of 10 my friends told me it was a sad anime, with 8/10 admitted crying.

Also, I documented snippets of my journey in this Twitter thread. You can check it if you want my raw, unedited reactions.

Did I cry?

No, actually! It definitely had me shocked and gasped several times.

I was confused a lot of times too. Like, “what? Why did they swap bodies? Wait… why did they stop swapping bodies?”. Anime mind blows are the best 💯

The music is very, very beautiful too. So beautiful that I think I need help. Need help to stop listening to it because I might be a tad too addicted to the music. It’s been day 2 where I just jammed to that movie's music only.

But after watching it, I was left disappointed. I didn’t shed a tear. Maybe I had my expectations too high?

So I then binge-watched other movies, with this order based on the ranking I mentioned above: rank 3 → rank 4 → rank 1, which I am glad I did.

“So you’re the girl from the lofi videos”

After all those binge-watching, did I find what I was looking for?

Not really. My goal is to cry, but I didn’t cry at all. Lol, call me heartless.

But after I finished watching The Garden of Words, I found enough things to be grateful for, then I stopped the marathon.

Allow me to share what I got to convince you to do the same.

I believe you should watch Kimi no Na Wa and The Garden of Words

If you had a journey like me, to find back your emotions again, I believe these anime movies did a tremendous job to remind you how to feel. Here are a few aspects I loved about those two.

Kimi no Na Wa

1. The music really carries the story
The music is just beautiful. I am a huge sucker for great music and for this movies’ music, I believe it can stand alone (without any existence of the movie) and I will still like it too. But when teamed up with the story and the visuals, it became a superhero team. They knew how to draw happiness and fear through the melodies and the pauses.
My favorite is the Theme of Mitsuha, which is eerily similar to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

2. The story is just weirdly exciting
The body-swapping, the comparison between life in the city and the village, the kawatare-doki are just exciting to learn. I really liked when they start to accept the body-swapping as something normal and create rules to maintain their regular lives.

3. I can start to understand why the Japanese love this movie
Everything is just so well made. Every frame of the movie is a wallpaper quality. The Japanese voice actors and actresses did a great job, especially when the main characters are swapping bodies, you can easily tell whose soul is it through how the lines are conveyed.

The Garden Of Words (my favorite!)

1. Not a lot of characters, but that’s what I like
The movie is mainly about two strangers, a boy and a woman, meeting in their chilling spots, every time the rain comes. That’s all. You only focus on how they started opening up bit by bit, while still not knowing a lot about each other.

2. Not a lot of things happened, but that’s what I like
Probably >50% of the movie is about the two main characters sharing their journey of growing up. How they fell down several times, but they still tried to find out how to walk on their own.
I can relate to this situation a lot. There have been multiple times when I came to a big social event, I wished I didn’t come or I wished I could just go to a quiet spot to have a one-to-one talk. A deeper talk without all the social pressure of being funny, being talkative, and so on.

3. Not a lot of dialogues, but that’s what I like
Some scenes are introduced with nothing but the sound of the rain. When they speak, they don’t waste anything. You can see how the expressions are shown through the hesitations, the gestures.
I know when one character wants to get closer. I know when one character is having a lot of things in their mind. I know the character well even though they don’t speak a lot.

I didn’t know a movie can be this minimalist, yet beautiful and heartbreaking as well. I really love this movie to the point I might rewatch it again in a year or two.

Bonus: if you watched The Garden of Words already, I found a really well-made analysis of the movie. Feel free to read it if you have time.

Conclusion

I’m glad I did the journey. I never thought I would be this fulfilled just by watching movies.

If you haven’t watched the movies or planning to rewatch them, just do it. For starters, I recommend starting from Kimi no Na Wa. If you like it, then feel free to watch the other movies. Remember to keep your expectations under control.

Cheers ✌