• The day the movie premièred in Shibuya was March 3rd 2007 which just happens to be the day before Takaki set out to meet Akari again.
• Shinkai and his team took over 5000 photos during their location hunting at Tanegashima for “Cosmonaut”.
• The initial story boarding and animatics took approximately 300 A4 pages and 980 backgrounds. A total of 1000 backgrounds were created for the final movie.

Episode 1 - Cherry Blossoms

• The spot where Takaki and Akari passes through in the first chapter of the movie, “Oukashou” was modelled off a grove in front of Sanguubashi Station and the clouds in the sky were rendered so that it resembles the skies Shinkai sees in his home town of Nagano.
• The public telephone box young Akari calls from is modelled off the one at the crossing in front of the Tokyo Jockey Club.
• The chairs and desks you see in the classrooms were modelled and randomly positioned by computer in 3D. The characters were then added using a cell.
• The titles written in Takaki and Akari’s library cards are real books such as Judith Worthy’s “Garden in the Sky” and C.S. Lewis’ “Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia“. This includes the novel that Akari reads later in high school, “The Grass Harp” by Truman Capote.
• The staff spent time writing all the text in the train timetables.
• The 24 x 24 dot, duo coloured LED display you see at the JR Shinjuku station scene was also used in “The Place Promised in Our Early Days” too.
• The vending machines Takaki uses during his journey are really based off the ones at Koyama Station on the Ryouke Line.
• You won’t be able to see the same retro waiting room and the wooden shed that the little couple was in in 1994 because the Iwafune Station has since been refurbished in 2003.
• The sudden change in weather from a snowy night to the clear blue sky with tiny sparsely separated clouds so that viewers could feel the sadness of our young couple’s separation and also the great world that lay ahead of them, almost to the point of despair.

Episode 2 - Cosmonaut

• The fantasy space scene at the start of Cosmonaut was created to show just how lonely Takaki was feeling in comparison to the down-to-earth environment that Kanae appears in when surfing.
• The school which Cosmonaut was based in, “Kagoshima Established Tanegashima Senior High” has now been renamed as “Tanegashima Central High School” in 2008 after it merged with “Tanegashima High”.
• The surfing fan you see is based on the real one used by the school's surfing club.
• The drinks that Kanae and Takaki chose were based off real products, namely a “200ml Yogurt” and “Tanegashima Coffee 500ml”. However, Tanegashima Coffee has since been acquired by Dairy Coffee.
• The H-IIA rocket was fired from the Tanegoshima Space Centre which is located at the town of Minamitane.

Episode 3 - 5 Centimetres per Second

• Takaki's apartment from the third episode of the movie was modelled after one in the Tokyo, Nakanosaka area.
• You can see the “crystals” that make up the text on the LCD screen of Takaki’s phone in the original High Definition, Blu-ray version of the movie which shows how much attention to detail there is in this animated movie.
• The snowing scene where there's lots of neon lights was modeled after the International Film Theatre at Kabuki-chou.
• The “conbini (convenience store)” that Takaki went into was captured during a location hunt. However, all the magazines and items you see there are all fiction. The staff had a little bit of fun drawing whatever they liked to decorate the racks.
• The aeroplane Kanae watches fly off is based off the YS-11 model.
• You won't be able to find the overhead night shot used during the music video in real life because the team went to a high building in Ikebukuro, shot multiple pictures and superimposed them to form it.
• Shinkai was unsure whether to end the movie with a song or not but he wanted to try something different. Instead of trying to fully immerse the viewers into the movie's world towards the end of the movie, he wanted the viewers to feel as if they themselves are the characters and bring out the emotions from there.