Voices of Distant Star (2002)
Voices of Distant Star Review
Voices of Distant Star is a 2002 romantic science fiction anime short film directed by Makoto Shinkai. It’s a very interesting early effort from this great filmmaker.
When a teenage girl is sent to a distant universe to battle aliens, her relationship with a boy is carried out through text messages that take ever longer to reach Earth. This movie was the first big project that Shinkai directed and that made him famous in the world of anime. It has everything that he would perfect even more in the subsequent movies, sharing the most DNA with ‘5 Centimeters Per Second’.
Although it has its memorable SF elements, this is effectively a romance story at its core. Mikako and Noboru received pretty solid character development for such a short runtime and their relationship felt genuinely moving. It’s a poetic film filled with that youthful spirit and deep emotions that characterize most of Shinkai’s opus, thus it functioned pretty much as an establishing film for his entire career.
I really liked the science-fiction elements and even the mecha ones as the robots looked cool and the sound design was excellent here and so was the beautiful score. The humans did seem like villains to be honest – they are after all the ones who pursued the poor aliens across the galaxy and not the other way around. But the visuals were fantastic and the mood of pensive longing so well achieved that the uneven plot ultimately still managed to be largely successful.
The animation is super polished for the time and I loved the designs of the mecha robots and the lighting effects. The dialogue is pretty good too, though it was funny that they were using these early 2000s cell phones in what is a distant future. In its intriguing, fresh mixing of the genres that don’t often mix together, the film managed to feel original and inspired.
