Voices of a Distant Star (2003) Movie Review
25 Min
Genre: Animation | Short | Drama
Director & Writer: Makoto Shinkai
Plot: The love of Japanese high school students Mikako Nagamine and Noboru Tera is tested when Mikako is sent to fight aliens in a distant universe and voice mails to and from Earth become months to years in transmission.
This is one of Makoto Shinkai's earlier short films and could be my favorite story of his in the concept of it.
It focus on two students who fall in love at the wrong time when Mikako has to travel galaxies away to fight off aliens that threat the Earth. We follow their conversations in the form of text messages as they both live their lives waiting for a message from each other. The main problem of the story is that with each text message that longer it takes to send as they both get older and older and farther away from each other.
Its very simple and short and that is what really works. You aren't told to much about why they are recruiting teenagers to go fight a war with aliens but you get to see how it all works and what kind of battle they have. You can see it borrows a lot of technology that was obviously in the early 2000s but it feels like this takes place in the future, its a nice balance.
Voices of a Distant Star is short but has a lot to offer, even to make me go and read the manga that was adapted after this film was released. The animation isn't amazing, but when I learn that Makoto Shinkai pretty much made everything second of this film by himself, its impressive! Definitely check this film out if you can.
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