Voices of a Distant Star

This film found its way onto my NetFlix queue due in part to it being in my “recommendations.” I got it during my early Anime craze during my trial membership.

The film is an anime that is approximately 30 minutes long, and entirely animated by Makoto Shinkai. He uses a combination of traditional hand drawings as well as some sweet CGI. The atmosphere and visual effects are quite stunning. However, the story is nothing to shake a stick at either.

The story basically revolve around two childhood friends. Nuboro and Mikako were young, and hoped to both attend the same school so they could stay together. But, apparently, those plains did not pain out, because Earth became threaten by some kind of alien race…or something. I am not exactly sure what was going on there. Mikako becomes so kind of mecha pilot for the United Nations to help fight the aliens to save humanity. But, since Nuboro did not pass the tests, or something like that, he gets left behind. Apparently, in the future, their only mode of communication was text messaging via their cell phones. I thought that was kind of interesting commentary on how communication takes place today…in Japan.

It seems as though, in order to fight the alien threat, the UN forces do light speed jumps from point to point. So, Mikako ages vary little, while Nuboro lives most of his life out. The message lengths grow from 1 month, to 1 year, to 8 years.

There are a few sci-fi style battle sequences in space, but the movie heavily relies on the emotion impact of the characters’ interaction. And, I must say that it was done very well.

Considering that the film is only 30 minutes long, and offers little in the way of special feature, I cannot condone purchasing it for the sticker price of $20. However, if you someone pick this one up for $10 or less, I would say it would be a decent buy.