he story behind the short anime piece Voices of a Distant Star is almost more interesting than the plot of the piece itself: Working alone on a Macintosh, a young Japanese man named Makoto Shinkai wrote, animated and edited his own miniature film, a 25-minute science-fiction meditation about two teenagers separated by time and space. Thanks to its surprisingly high production values and its remarkable artistic quality, Voices won Shinkai a prestigious award, but it also sparked a small uproar in the anime industry as professionals exclaimed over what may become a new wave of anime: small-scale productions assembled without the benefit, or the interference, of established studios.
Voices is a quiet, melancholy, internal piece that follows two young teenagers who part ways when one joins the U.N. Space Force and travels across the galaxy as part of an expeditionary force seeking out the alien fleet that destroyed Earth's first Martian colony. Mikako was 15 years old when she and her middle-school friend Noboru parted; as she passes Mars, then Jupiter, then Pluto, and then warp-jumps on to Sirius, she sends text messages via cell phone to Noboru, who didn't make the U.N. cut and is waiting for her on Earth. The further out she gets, the longer her messages take to make it home; eventually, she's typing her increasingly lonely "Hello's" and "I'm still here's" into her phone knowing that she's still 15 but that Noboru will be 24 years old when he finally sees them.
Noboru, meanwhile, first waits patiently for her messages and then steels himself not to wait at all. If there are other people in his life, Voices doesn't acknowledge them; he and Mikako seem to exist alone in their own little increasingly distended and echoing world, as lovers sometimes do. As Mikako faces incomprehensible alien attackers and stands on the surface of a world no other human being has ever seen, Noboru walks through a void of his own making, effectively making his Earth just as empty and foreign as Mikako's distant world.
Light on story, but heavy on mood
The Voices DVD predictably pads out its run time with a flock of extras: trailers, animatics, a mostly incoherent interview with Shinkai himself and a "director's cut with alternate vocals," which is actually more of a test reel, in which Shinkai and a friend read the script to match the animation, before more professional voice actors were found. The real prize of the collection is a series of different cuts of an earlier award-winning Shinkai project. The stylized black-and-white short "She and Her Cat" offers another subdued but evocative story, this time about a marshmallow-like cat who idolizes his mistress, though he doesn't really understand her. Though that short's scope is far smaller, the style that Shinkai took into Voices of a Distant Star is clearly visible: The extremely realistic backgrounds, based on actual settings; the focus on small details and environments that give his work a sense of depth while letting him avoid complex motion; and the powerful evocation of buried emotions.
All these things come out even more strongly in Voices. The film does use a lot of shortcuts; the often-immobile human characters mostly speak in voiceover, or with their backs to the viewer, or with their mouths offscreen. But Shinkai makes the most of the motion he does use: The space battles are dazzling and immersive, and environmental details like rain, snow and glaring sunbeams set the mood and give a sense of complex motion. Mostly, Shinkai's incredibly detailed and beautifully colored tableaux are so rich and so numerous that the film itself seems to be moving around its characters—all of which further contributes to the exquisite sense of lonely isolation and human stillness.
Voices doesn't have a strong plot arc, and it concludes without resolution. It's a mood piece, not a story piece, but it's remarkably effective at setting that mood. From the simple piano accompaniment and sweet elegy on the soundtrack to the hushed voices to the cold and elegant visuals, Voices presents a pitch-perfect portrait of loneliness. It doesn't try to do much more, and it doesn't need to. It's possible that no studio would ever gamble on something this daring and different. Thanks to Shinkai, they didn't need to.
Shinkai's commentary on the DVD's packaging actually provides considerably more insight than his stammering, shy video interview. I suspect he's just not good at being put on the spot with a camera stuck in his face: Certainly he has no problems expressing himself through his wonderful art.
— Tasha
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