The other evening I was sitting in front of the TV, wanting to watch some lighthearted and relaxing anime, so I chose Voices of a Distant Star by Makoto Shinkai. (Warning: this is sarcasm.)
Mr. Shinkai’s films are good examples of the ability of animation to affect us emotionally by creating believable characters in uniquely dramatic or tragic situations, usually involving really beautiful images of beautiful skies, since that’s what he’s into.
Voices is the story of Mikako, a middle-school student who been chosen to travel into space and fight an alien race called the Tarsians. She enjoys typing mails to her classmate Noboru, pecking away on her cell phone as she tells him about each stage in her journey away from Earth. As the story progresses, the mails take longer to reach him, with each message eventually taking eight years to arrive due to her distance from the Earth. Waiting that long for your phone to beep with an incoming message becomes an exquisitely painful concept, and I was really drawn into the story.
Go watch this great anime now!
I’m a fan of the grand stories told by Makoto Shinkai.
