Garden of Words or 言の葉の庭 (kotonoha no niwa) is a drama/romance anime released on May 13th 2013 by CoMix Wave Films. Directed by Makoto Shinkai who I believe to be the best anime artist in the world, he has been called the ''new Hayao Miyazaki'' (lead Ghibli studio artist) in many reviews.
Garden of words has come highly recommended by the iTunes staff and was selected as iTunes best animation of 2013. In addition to the high acclaim on iTunes it won the 2013 Kobe Theatrical Film Award. At the 2013 Fantasia International Film Festival, it shared the Satoshi Kon Award for Achievement in Animation with Berserk: Golden Age Arc III - Descent while winning the Audience Award for Best Animation Feature. At the 2014 Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film, it won the AniMovie Award for feature films. The daring coloring style and inovative backdrop style are what appealed me the most to me, I also believe that any kind of artist would easily relate to the main character.
During production, a novel coloring method was used to mimic the refraction of light on the characters' skin. Like other japanese anime Garden of Words was created using a combination of hand-drawn animation, rotoscoping and CGI. Makoto Shinkai drew half the backgrounds using photographs as a base and usign Photoshop over the top. The character retain the basic anime faces but are still convincing and realistic.
It's way up there in my top 5 favourite animes.
Makoto Shinkai
