From the auteur anime director Makoto Shinkai (Voices of a Distant Star, 5cm Per Second) comes the first five-minute scene of his newest film, The Garden of Words. The opening footage was originally aired by TV Tokyo during a Saturday showing of one of Shinkai’s previous films, The Place Promised in Our Early Days.

You can view the scene down below:

The scene takes place during the rainy season in June, where Takao (Miyu Irino), a shoe-maker-in-training, meets a mysterious older woman (Kana Hanazawa) while sketching shoes at a Japanese garden. From that encounter, the two will continue to meet and deepen their relationship. Behind the beautifully animated sequences are Kenichi Tsuchiya, who designed the characters and oversaw the animation, Hiroshi Takiguchi, who served as the art director, and Daisuke Kashiwa, who composed the music.

Makoto Shinkai said that The Garden of Words is the first movie he’s made that is about love in the Japanese concept. According to the director, the word “love” was originally written as koi, which meant “lonely sadness”; the modern concept of “love”, or ai, was imported from the West. With the film taking place in a contemporary era, Shinkai appears to be bridging the gap between antiquity and modernity by basing love, with the meaning of “lonely sadness”, to show the longing affections between two people in solitude.

The Garden of Words was shown at Australia’s Gold Coast Film Festival (GCFF) last month, and will see a Japanese theatrical run beginning on May 31st. The 46-minute film has also been licensed by Sentai Filmworks for a North American home video on bilingual Blu-ray and DVD, as well as a digital release.

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