European Festival Premiere | In Competition | Online
Japan, 2025, 121’, Japanese
Directed by: Okuyama Yoshiyuki
Screenplay: Suzuki Ayako, Shinkai Makoto
Cinematography (color): Imamura Keisuke
Editing: Hirai Kenichi
Music: Ezaki Ayatake
Art Director: Inoue Shinpei
Producers: Tamai Hiromasa, Sano Dai
Cast: Matsumura Hokuto, Takahata Mitsuki, Mori Nana, Miyazaki Aoi, Yoshioka Hidetaka
Date of First Release in Territory: October 10th, 2025
Released in Japan in 2007,
5 Centimeters Per Second was an animated trilogy by Shinkai Makoto, featuring a smart loner boy, Tono Takaki, who befriends a bright-eyed loner girl, Shinohara Akari, after she transfers to his Tokyo elementary school in 1991. They bond over not only their common transfer student status – Takaki entered the school a year before Akari – but also their shared passion for reading, with Takaki devouring books about astronomy and Akari enthusiastically following his lead.
In 1994 Akari moves to Tochigi, a snowy prefecture north of Tokyo. The two children keep in touch with letters, but when Takaki hears that his family will soon depart for Kagoshima, a city at the far southern tip of the country, he realizes that he and Akari will be too far apart for visits – and arranges to see her one last time at a rural train station equidistant from both. Despite a snowstorm and train delays, they finally meet – and exchange a first kiss – but before Takaki’s return train departs Akari cannot bring herself to give him a letter that says what is really in her heart.
With its gorgeous visual realism – the characters move through real-life spaces that look like paintings – and perfervid youthful romanticism,
5 Centimeters Per Second became a beloved keystone to Shinkai’s subsequent hit films, which had similar themes and aesthetics, if far larger budgets.
Released in Japan late last year, Okuyama Yoshiyuki’s live-action
5 Centimeters Per Second, follows the same storyline as the animated original, including segments devoted to Takaki’s high school senior year in Tanegashima, the island hosting Japan’s space center, and his adulthood in Tokyo, where he is working as a programmer – and is still obsessed with Akari, whom he never saw again after that snowy kiss in front of a huge cherry tree standing alone in a field.
Starring Matsumura Hokuto and Takahata Mitsuki as the adult Takaki and Akari, the film is not a shot-by-shot remake. Instead Okuyama and his team have channeled the emotions and atmospherics of the anime to create a world of natural beauty and manmade wonders, from the spreading, snow-covered cherry tree where Takaki and Akari pledged to reunite to the spectacular launch of a rocket at Tanegashima that seems to symbolize the teenaged Takaki’s hopes and dreams.
Meanwhile, the story of the adult Takaki teases the possibility of a reunion with Akari, who is now a bookshop clerk. When she goes to deliver books to a planetarium where the manager, the kindly Dr. Ogawa (Yoshioka Hidetaka), has invited Takaki to emcee a program, a meeting after a gap of eighteen years looks tantalizingly likely.
But now 30 after spending most of his youth in longing for the paradise he and Akari once shared, Takaki senses that Akari has found a new life where childhood pledges are fondly remembered, but not acted on.
A full-throated romantic drama,
5 Centimeters Per Second is also a feeling meditation on time’s relentless passage that erodes even a fervent first love between soul mates. Its message: Live that love while you can.
Okuyama Yoshiyuki
Okuyama Yoshiyuki (b. 1991) began his career with a focus on photography. In 2011 he won the New Cosmos of Photography Excellence Award and has since become a prolific author of photobooks, including the award-winning Bacon Ice Cream. Okuyama has also directed iconic music videos for artists such as Yonezu Kenshi and Hoshino Gen, as well as directing CMs for brands like Pocari Sweat and GU. He made his feature directorial debut with 5 Centimeters Per Second, a live-action adaptation of the acclaimed Shinkai Makoto anime that opened in Japan in October of 2025.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
2025 – 5 Centimeters Per Second