The Place Promised In Our Early Days ADV 90 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 07/12/2005 Reviewed: 02/07/2006

Back To P Listings

Listen to Dave and Joel talk about this show. (right click, save as)

 

Voices of a Distant Star was, bar none, one of the best animated films I have ever seen. Aside from the great (and totally depressing story) what made it equally appealing was the animation... accomplished by a single man, Makoto Shinkai, in about six or seven months. It's certainly not up to par of some of the greats in the anime industry, but... come on! In a half a year one guy created one of the best anime films of our time. Now he's got a new one on the market, one with an actual budget and sizable talent (in addition to his own greatness). I gushed so much about Voices that I figured it'd be tough to approach this with any sort of neutrality. Oh well, I've never been of the opinion that a critical writer should be unbiased and sometimes I fancy myself an amateur at the "art". I have to do my best, but I imagine a bit of fanboy gushing is in order. Okay so here it goes.

 

There's a guy and a girl and another guy and maybe they both have crushes on her and they're trying to build a plane so they can go fly over to this awesome tower on the other side of a now-seperated Asia and they promise they'll all go together but the girl falls into a coma and in the few years of interim following high school the two boys have basically forgotten (or given up) about things. Now the smart, older one is a scientist trying to work out why the giant white spire that he obsessed about as a boy is drawing in matter from a parallel universe. The girl is forgotten, that is, until research shows that the girl in question may be more than a little related to the events at the tower in question. With the Northern and Southern alliances of Asia on the brink of water, the girl and the tower and the plane might hold the key to solving everyone's problems... or at least stopping the world from getting covered up by "black stuff".

 

It's so crazy a plot that it almost sounds cookie cutter by anime standards. If you feel like I've spoiled a lot for you, I really haven't. There's more to the story than that. If Voices was any indication, Shinkai's work is a lot more about the experience of the plot unfurling than it is about the plot itself. After all, his breakout work could be summed up with "Text Messages IN SPACE!!!", which doesn't sound excessively appealing, but it sure as heck worked out in execution! I'm more interested in seeing the guy work his magic all over the interpersonal relationships than I'm really concerned about seeing stuff blow up. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally down with stuff blowing up, but there is a rare moment every once in awhile where I want to see something deeper that doesn't make me want to tear my eyes out with the uncomfortably bad amount of angst it spews out. Shinkai's movies are sad, it's hard not to notice that, but they're not hopeless and they're certainly not all "emo". Let's remember that Voices had a hopeful ending, despite its somber tone.

 

And sometimes all you really want is to let out a little emotion at the television screen. I know it sounds silly, but I want to see animated people have problems with their love lives, provided those problems don't involve a thirteen year old girl getting peeped on in the shower and then proceeding to sock their voyeuristic housemate in the gut and send him flying through three walls. This is more the kind of film that you could show to people uninterested in the genre and say "It's not all porn and tentacles, really!" and be semi-truthful while doing so. I'm not gonna go and say "Shinkai does it again!" and plaster gold stars all over the internet. The Place Promised has its flaws. It's too long, notably, and while there's nothing that's going to immediately spring off the screen and slap you in the face with its out-of-placeness, the film just drags at points. It's a lot harder to notice his pondering storytelling style when it's only 25 minutes long and at points The Place Promised doesn't really have enough information to present to you to justify its "feature length" running time -- shotgunning spoofed scientific jargon at the audience doesn't really count -- but when you look at the quality of storytelling that IS contained in here (and its best bits are really good) it's an easy pill to swallow. It's not really the masterpiece that Voices is, but The Place Promised is a resoundingly solid, heart-wrenching movie all the same. All I have to hope now is that the man keeps getting his funding long enough to prove he's not a one trick pony.