n 2003, young Japanese writer/director Makoto Shinkai unveiled the remarkable short film Voices of a Distant Star, a sweet 25-minute opus about a young couple separated by an increasing gap as one of them headed into space. Produced entirely in Shinkai's home on his Macintosh, Voices bowled Japan's animation industry over with its technical proficiency and sophistication, and Shinkai quickly gained studio backing for his feature debut, the equally sweet and melancholy 90-minute movie The Place Promised in Our Early Days.
The film takes place in an alternate Japan that has split into two factions: In the south, the Alliance works closely with the American military. In the north, Hokkaido is claimed by the mysterious separatist Union, which erects an immense tower that stretches so far into the clouds that it resembles an orbital elevator. Two boys, Hiroki Fujisawa and Tayuka Shirakawa, grow up in the south in the tower's shadow, and devote themselves to building a small plane so they can visit it someday. Making a friend out of energetic classmate Sayuri Sawatari, they let her in on their secret and promise to take her with them when they go.
But one day Sayuri disappears without warning, and the heart goes out of the project. Hiroki and Tayuka abandon their dream, and as the years pass, they follow very different paths. Tayuka becomes a researcher exploring the phenomenon of parallel dimensions. The Union Tower, it seems, is a highly advanced experimental facility that opens pathways to other words; while Tayuka's Alliance team is laboring to shift a piece of matter the size of a sand grain from one dimension to another, the Tower is gating through 20-kilometer-square spaces. As war between the Union and Alliance looms, Tayuka falls in with a terrorist group bent on destroying the Tower, which they see as a terrifying weapon. Meanwhile, Hiroki is more interested in finding and helping Sayuri, whose strange fate is also connected to the Tower.
The skill survived the studio
In America, at least, the first studio project of a successful, sought-after young indie director is always a major gamble for viewers: So many idealistic visionaries get sucked into the system and promptly lose everything that made them unique or interesting. In Shinkai's case, at least, fans can breathe a sigh of relief: His first feature retains all the idiosyncrasies of his debut, to the extent that it doesn't even necessarily show its studio roots. The same deep, welling emotion and clarity of tone pervade the whole piece, as does the sense that Shinkai is shooting as much for mood as for a standalone story. Early Days is sad and sensitive, from its evocative score to its touching focus on lost memory. There's very little action; much of the film could be considered an extended flashback, as characters reminisce about how they got where they are.
Even the animation style is much like Shinkai's solo feature: It's rich and extremely colorful and complicated, like a less cartoony Hayao Miyazaki movie, but Shinkai keeps the shots short and the motion minimal. His characters are smoothly animated, but they don't provide a lot of excess motion; often, they're dwarfed by the settings, which adds to the sense of wistful detachment. Still, the slow pans across Shinkai's gorgeous tableaux provide a strong sense of movement, and the animation is more dynamic than it was in Voices, though Shinkai is again putting the focus on depth of field and layers of color rather than on quick, eye-catching action.
Fans of the similarly thoughtful, low-key Wings of Honneamise, or of early Studio Ghibli films like Only Yesterday and Whisper of the Heart, will find a rare treasure in The Place Promised in Our Early Days, a film as much about the hope of youth and the bitter disappointments of adulthood as about warring nations and experimental weaponry. With Miyazaki repeatedly threatening to retire, it's good to know that there's someone new on the scene who's just as capable of producing serious, thoughtful, powerful anime that's as beautifully animated as it is written.
One researcher characterizes parallel dimensions as "the dreams of the universe" and suggests that psychic phenomena emerge when people unconsciously access other worlds and other possibilities outside their own timelines. This was the one thing I wish Early Days had delved into a little deeper, just because I found it such an interesting theory.
— Tasha
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