03.18
I’ve honestly never heard of Makoto Shinkai before the trailer for The Garden of Words came out, but the overall style and drama the trailer hinted at was enough to pique my interests. And whaddya know, a couple weeks later, crunchyroll just so happened to be streaming his better known movies for public visual consumption. How convenient.
One of the first Japanese dramas I ever looked into in some form was Saikano: The Last Love Song on This Little Planet. I didn’t read past the first half of the series for one reason or another, but my lasting impressions of the series remain as follows: unnecessary sex, and a war-time situation that’s never really explained all that much in favor of focusing on the main couple. Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star is pretty much that latter part, except done in such a way that I actually don’t mind it.
The OVA tells the story of Mikako, a young girl taken to fight some far-off war in a giant robot (y’know, typical anime stuff) and Noboru, the boy she leaves behind. The only means of communication with each other while Mikako’s off fighting aliens and the like in space is via texting. But the real problem comes when the time it takes for texts to reach each other increases the farther out Mikako travels.
The whole idea of kids being sent to fight aliens in a galactic war of some sort has been done to death, even by the time this OVA came out, but it’s able to give a certain twist that I at least find significant enough for it to stand out on its own right. Clocking in at only 25 minutes, Voices of a Distant Star doesn’t exactly have all the time in the world to flesh out the details of what this galactic war entails and why kids have to fight in it, and it’s clearly aware of such. Sure, it’ll give some brief moments of exposition here and there, but there seems to be an intentional lack of focus given towards such information simply because we as the viewers don’t have to know every nook and cranny reason behind things.
But that’s not to say the film makes any sacrifices for the sake of time. If anything, it handles its story-telling and pacing in such a way that you feel you’re not short-changed or densely uh… “over-changed” either.
Sure, you’re given the futuristic setting of intergalactic war, but the real heart of the story comes in the form of Mikako and Noboru’s interactions. As the two send each other messages literally traveling light-years to reach their recipient, there’s a certain level of anxiety the characters have that I’m sure most are familiar with. Letter-exchanging in general seems to be a lost art form, especially by today’s standards, so to be witness to these two children struggling to find just the right words to tell the other about their mundane day-in-the-life is endearing, to say the least. And to have such happen while the elephant in the room that is the alien war is only vaguely mentioned in their letters makes the characters that much more relatable. Regardless of time and setting, I think we can all agree that during times of war, people do their best to try and think of something less depressing when conversing with others, even if it comes in a form as simple as saying what you’ve been up to lately. It’s that level of relatability that really makes this OVA.