I’m not usually one to tear up at every chick flick that someone tricks me into watching, so I never really expected I’d ever catch myself crying to an anime, but this immensely beautiful piece of modern art proved me wrong. The power of the loneliness I felt in the characters was so strong that I actually felt sad enough to cry for them. This short movie that started Makoto Shinkai’s prospering anime career is well deserving of my praise. I was seriously awestruck after watching this. I had a few episodes of other shows after this in my media player playlist, but after this ended I had to pause for a few minutes just to pull myself back to reality from the intense emotions it invoked.
Voices Of A Distant Star is a story of a teenage couple, separated by the vast expanse of outer space with only emails sent from a cellphone to tie the two together. As the girl is dragged light year upon light year further from Earth the messages take longer and longer to transmit until eventually they are so far apart that it takes 8 years just to send a message. The love between the two is so powerful that, despite light years of space and nearly a decade of time between them, they still so strongly want to talk to each other.
What amazed me the most about this however is that almost every part of the movie was done by Makoto Shinkai himself; from the directing, to the animation, right down to the voice acting played by himself and his wife. For being a project completed by a single man this is extraordinary beyond belief. Mr. Shinkai is a very talented man and is very well deserved of the following he has developed thus far.
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