Voices of a Distant Star Film Review

What the hell. After watching this poignant anime from Makoto Shinkai, I read that he animated it all by himself on his home computer. It is only 25-minutes long but still. This was only his second effort and though he has gone on to become perhaps the premier animator of the day with Weathering with You and Your Name, much of his skills, imagination and heart are on display in this one. It is about yearning, memories and waiting. Yes, also about a war in space in which one of the protagonists travels at the speed of light and galaxies away but it is the yearning for the past that it is really about. It could have just as easily been about two lovers from a few centuries ago separated by oceans and continents, but Makoto adds a little buzz to it by placing it in the future in space.

Nagamine and Noboru are teenage friends verging on innocent love but Nagamine is recruited into the UN Space Agency leaving Noboru behind on earth to finish his schooling. In a genre switch, Nagamine is the female going off to war - a 15-year-old one who oddly continues to wear her school uniform. An alien race the Tarsians have attacked human colonists on Mars and the fleet goes in search of them. Nagamine is a fighter pilot on a Tracer. But she never forgets Noboru and sends him emails as she travels from Mars to Jupiter and beyond. But the emails take longer and longer to be delivered. Years in fact. Yet love only grows. Memories of their time together never fades. The animation itself is not what it was to become but still impressive considering his limitations. Nagamine's big goopy eyes feel too anime really - but much of Japanese anime falls into that as well as the school uniform. It ends too soon for my liking.