destroying all monsters

INSPIRED BY JAL’S post here, I thought I might also take the opportunity to pimp Makoto Shinkai’s latest work, 秒速５センテメートル or Byousoku 5 Centimeter.

Subtitled, in what appears to be excellent ‘Engrish’, A Chain of Short Stories About Their Distance, the collection of three vignettes (called Oukashou, Cosmonaut and Byousoku 5 Centimeter) is due to premier in spring 2007.

Makoto Shinakai has been compared favourably to the famed Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, and certainly they are both master animators. Byousoku 5 Centimeter appears to signal another exponential leap in the sheer beauty of the images rendered on the screen, similar to that witnessed between Voices of a Distant Star and Place Promised in our Early Days, Shinkai’s first proper film, and first full-length movie respectively.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it, you can watch the trailer in various ways here. Or even better, you can download a 60MB high-definition WMV file of the same file here (recommended if your computer is up to the task of playing it).

Makoto Shinkai also happens to be a bit of a train otaku, which is no bad thing. How else can you explain the sheer amount of railways that appear in his films! I leave you with four rail-themed screen shots from the trailer, which are reproduced at about 8% of their actual hi-definition size, below, but which still look great.

Wow, just wow! The only thing that lets it down is the mediocre ‘theme’ music, sung by what appears to be the Japanese equivilent of M*ch**l B*lt*n.

Finally, if you think these are pretty, Shinkai’s website has a large collection of wallpapers from the new movie, plus some from his earlier films here.