I recently re-watched The Garden of Words. The second paragraph will contain a few mild spoilers.

The Garden of Words is a story about two characters: a young male student (Takao Akizuki) and a mysterious adult woman (Yukari Yukino) who touch base with each other on days where it rains. It initially starts off as an accidental meeting between two strangers, but, as time goes on, it happens so frequently that eventually the pair silently agree to meet with each other at the garden whenever it rains. Takao is an aspiring shoemaker and it's that treasured pastime which becomes the main point of conversation between him and Yukari, wherein he sheds his usually reticent deportment in favor of a talkative personality where he freely opens up to Yakuri about his pastime, which seems to be an opportunity rarely granted to him in his everyday life. Yukari's side of the story is kept hush-hush until about halfway through the movie where we start to get little peeks into who she is and what she does.

I've never been good at writing movie reviews, but what I found interesting about the crux of the movie reviews written for The Garden of Words is that quite a few Western viewers took issue with the quiet nature of the "romance", which I felt was missing the point because romance was never meant to be the focal point of their story. It played a part, especially from Takao's perspective, but the plot centralizes around the impromptu bond that materializes between two lonely people. There's a Japanese term for this bond: "koi", which means "a sense of longing for companionship in solitude", which - in the context of The Garden of Words - is shown by Takao and Yukari finding solace in each other in times of loneliness and hardship. I think Makoto Shinkai has always taken an authentic and characteristically Japanese approach to human relationships where little is verbalized but a lot is done. It's just done quietly, but I feel like that sense of subtlety is lost on Western viewers who want a quick and fiery "Romeo and Juliet" style love affair. They're viewing it through the wrong lens. Here, it's always the simple stuff, there's a focus on companionship where romantic love usually takes a backseat to platonic love.

If anything, I'd recommend the movie to anybody who admires high quality animation. And it's only 46 minutes long. I posted a GIF of one of my favorite scenes from the movie above, but I seriously don't feel like anything I find online will do it justice. I've never known how to rate movies because either I'm telling everyone and their moms about the movie I just watched, or it's something I forget about until someone mentions it to me years later.