Voices of a Distant Star ADV 25 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 06/10/2003

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I'm not often serious with you here, or when I am I'm rarely serious about being serious. There's a hundred thousand anime sites you could go to out there to get a serious review, with stuff like in-depth plot analysis and bar graphs to describe relative bitrates. Sure, most of those sites totally suck and we're awesome, but that doesn't give me carte blanche to do whatever I want. The fact of the matter is that this site is humor based because the internet doesn't NEED another serious review site, plus I'm better at being funny than smart... which is not to say that I'm really -that- funny. If you're a long time reader of this site (if such a thing exists) then you'll know I've only really spilled my guts about maybe like... two shows. Well, chalk it right up to three. If you'll kindly struggle through it with me, I promise the next time this happens will be a long time in coming. People like you and me weren't lucky enough to experience stuff like Tezuka or Ishinomori, we weren't really even around for the heydays of Go Nagai and Miyazaki. That kind of sucks. Right now we live in a time where you can guess that any given show coming out of Japan has something to do with robot sex slaves, or maids that end up being robot sex slaves, and you'll be right with probably a degree of well over 90% certainty. What kind of freaking life is that? When I got into anime, it wasn't because I wanted to see a chick slap a guy up into space, through the moon and Venus and directly into the sun.

No, I actually wanted to see robots do that to each other. But that's probably a different matter. What I'm trying to say is, Makoto Shinkai, this show's director and animator, this show's EVERYTHING, might be our Tezuka. Voices of a Distant Star doesn't have a lot going for it on the surface. The cover art is pretty minimalist, and the promised run time of "approximately 30 minutes (+75 with extras)" would serve to turn off even the most hard-core viewer. Its MSRP of $19.99 doesn't really help anything either. You and I remember it well, the early days of anime DVDs where publishers thought they could treat you the same as when VHS was still the driving force in the anime market. Newer members of the anime market will probably be appalled by the low runtime to cost ratio of this disc, but I think it's prudent to have faith. If any of the anime companies don't have a sound business sense, it's not ADV. If ADV thinks they can market a 30 minute (give or take 15 minutes more original footage) disc for $20 then you can be damn sure that they've got something worthwhile.

Unless it's yet another maid show. The dichotomy of that company is pretty astounding. Voices of a Distant Star also does more to discourage you than just its packaging. Primarily composed of pretty overt CG animation, the show can almost be an eyesore at points. I'm willing to cut the short some slack though, because it was composed by one man over the course of seven months. What have YOU done in the past seven months? I've written up maybe 40 reviews or so, if even that... it's probably more like 20. Those reviews take about fifty minutes to write, and we've got someone out there that's got the patience and the perspicacity to sit there and make something like this. The animation is a detractor? No, the animation is its primary compellor. Given the nature of the story, the ultra-simple animation style it's presented in is the only one I could imagine, having seen it done that way. Better animation would've ruined the thing and, frankly, I've seen worse CG robots in better budgeted shows. Much worse. If, for any of the reasons stated above, you ignore this show then you're doing yourself a criminal disservice.

Voices of a Distant Star's skeleton plot is so stagnant and unoriginal that it's barely worth mentioning. There's a boy and a girl, a couple in middle school, and aliens attack Earth and the girl gets shipped off to fight in a giant robot because she has better test scores. That's about as unimpressive as it gets, right? But Voices of a Distant Star is about the robots even less than Key: The Metal Idol is about the robots. The entirety of the story is so much more that I don't think I can do it justice. They keep in touch, the boy on Earth and the girl constantly moving through the stars, via her cellphone's text messaging service. When she's first shipped out messages take only days, but those days turn into weeks, into months, into years, and practically decades. While the boy, Noboru, ages on Earth, only a scant few months have gone by for Mikako, the girl left in the timelessness of space. I almost feel bad spoiling for you the greater plot, because now you won't have the shock I had when it all started to come together. The romance and deep sense of longing this show imparts to its viewers was almost more than I could bear, especially with the addition of one of the most stunning vocal pieces ever to fit the screen as a finale. Any longer and it's arguable whether or not this show would've had me in tears, the plight of Noboru and Mikako is both heartwrenching and completely befuddling. But at the bottom of it, it's very real. The whole short is like that. Real. Makoto Shinkai is basically an unknown to us. A young, bespectacled guy who comes from some game company that he doesn't bother naming. The entirety of what I know of him is from an 8 minute interview on the disc yet, through Voices of a Distant Star I feel like he and I are best pals. Its rare that something of such quality, of such personal impact, comes out of anime in recent times, or comes to US Shores at least. Now we mostly just have vampires raping chicks. Whatever. Voices of a Distant Star makes me wish I had a rating better than "5", Voices of a Distant Star is what I'd show to someone who hates anime and I bet it'd still garner a response, Voices of a Distant Star could be the most powerful 25 minutes of your life, well... probably not. But it might be the most powerful animated film you watch all year. Thanks Makoto Shinkai. Thanks for making me believe again.