Voices of a Distant Star
Synopsis
The year is 2046. A mysterious alien force has attacked a Mars base and is escaping from the solar system. Earth drastically sets up an attack mission to chase the aliens and a girl is chosen to be a part of the crew. She leaves to go fight the aliens, leaving her boyfriend Noboru alone. The only connection they have between each other is through cell-phone text messages, which first takes days, then months, and then years to reach each of them. Can their love survive the years of loneliness?
Review
Voices of a Distant Star is the hard laborious journey of it’s creator Makoto Shinkai. He, alone on one iMac, made this 30 minute anime film and is one of the most impressive works of an independent filmmaker I’ve ever seen. It’s powerful and sad, uplifting yet depressing, and in the small time of 30 minutes the film will draw upon every ounce of your emotions to send you through one of the most memorable animes ever. I kid you not. The two main characters are interesting, you feel for their plight, the action is actually fairly cool with these ethereal alien designs and very gundam-esque designs for the Earth’s mechs and the story is gut-wrenching. I haven’t felt so depressed in such a short amount of time.
Mikako’s journey through the stars is a long, arduos journey of longing for the one thing she really wants, but cannot have. It’s made all the worse when the ages between Noboru and Mikako start to spread out because of Mikako’s space travel outside of our solar system. At one point in the film, a text message is sent to Noboru from Mikako saying, ‘Happy 24th birthday from your 15 year old girlfriend.’ It was an emotional strain for me just to hear it, and that’s when you know you are watching something so powerful, so visceral that it might just be something stunning.
The Breakdown
I really have said everything I wanted to say. There are only so many ways one can say: ‘buy this good sh** [editted for the kiddies, just to show you we care] now.’