When it comes to the most beautiful things in this world, cherry blossoms kind of tops the list. Every person must have dreamt at least once in their life, to sit under the cherry blossoms, and talk about life.
The cherry blossom is a flower of many trees like Genus Prunus. The most well-known species is the Japanese cherry, Prunus Serrulata which is commonly called sakura. It is the national flower of Japan.
Now Japan surely knows how to make use of this beautiful asset of theirs. Almost every important scene or event occurring in an anime is symbolized by cherry blossoms fleeting around in the air. In Japan, they say, sakura a symbolism of new beginnings, dreams, hope, and love.
“I met this girl under the cherry blossoms and my fate has begun to change”, from ‘Your Lie in April’, symbolizes new beginnings and how the presence of cherry blossoms make these little moments of life so important.
In ‘Clannad’, the first episode is called, “On the Hillside where Cherry Blossoms Flutter”, the title symbolizes the hope that the protagonists bring into each other’s lives, upon meeting each other, in fact, they meet each other with the cherry blossoms in the background. Sakura trees reflect their lives — of the past that they have to shed to usher in a new beginning, and of those, they have lost. Every spring, the falling cherry petals are a reminder of how brief and fleeting life is so we should all cherish every bit of beauty that life has to offer.
In ‘5 Centimeters per Second’, they describe how 5 centimeters per second is the speed at which the cherry blossoms fall, this speed is very beautiful, or rather painfully compared to the speed at which the protagonists have to live their lives just to see each other again. The movie also compares falling in love, with the falling cherry blossoms, the idea of which is itself something so beautiful, absorbing, and heart endearing. Cherry blossoms are the most common in the scenes where the protagonists meet each other in their childhood, blossoming of a friendship that gradually turns into love.
Cherry blossoms hold a poetic beauty to themselves, which allows them to be a metaphor to almost any feeling, any important event or rather anything that’s beautiful about love and the Japanese anime world has clearly made the most beautiful use of this pretty asset.
Text by: Sreyoshi Sil, IBTN9
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