Voices of a Distant Star is a virtual one-man show from Makoto Shinkai. © 2002 Makoto Shinkai / CoMix Wave Inc. All rights reserved.

Voices of a Distant Star.
OAV, 2002. Creator: Makoto Shinkai. 25 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $19.98. Distributor: A.D.V. Films.

Anime releases are practically all commercial projects. Voices of a Distant Star (Hoshi no Koe) is a rare exception; an amateur fine art film that was written, animated and edited entirely by Makoto Shinkai. It combines both cel animation and computer graphics done on a Power Macintosh 7600/120 computer. Without the background notes describing this, it would be indistinguishable in quality from any finished professional anime work.

Shinkai, born in 1973, was hired in the '90s as art director for a computer gaming design company. The experience he got with the company's software led him to create his own animated films. His first, the black-and-white short, She and Her Cat, won the Japan Annual Animation Contest in 2000. He quit his job to spend seven months working at home on Voices of a Distant Star, with himself and his fiancée performing the voices. A manga/anime publisher, MangaZoo, financed a new soundtrack with professional voices, sound effects and music.

The 25-minute short film premiered at the Future Film Festival in Bologna, Italy, January 16-20, 2002, and in Japan at the Tokyo International Anime Fair 21, February 15-17, where Shinkai won an award for Most Valuable Newcomer. MangaZoo's 10,000-copy DVD release on April 19, 2002 (including an 80-page "making of" booklet with all the storyboard art) sold out within a week. A.D.V. licensed the American rights and premiered the film at the Anime Expo 2002 convention last July in Long Beach, California, with Shinkai as a guest speaker.

Voices of a Distant Star is a languid, tragic romance amidst a high-tech setting. Mikako Nagamine and Noboru Terao are mid-teen sweethearts. It is 2047; aliens have attacked the Solar System and the U.N. builds a faster-than-light spaceship to strike back. Mikako is selected for the crew because of her superior reflexes. She and Noboru promise to stay in frequent touch, but as the spaceship travels ever further from Earth, it takes increasingly long for their electronic messages to reach each other. Noboru must mark on a calendar how many months it will take for him to get Mikako's next call.

As the U.N. spaceship reaches the star Sirius, Mikako becomes despondent knowing that it will take more than eight years at the speed of light for Noboru to get her latest call. Will he wait that long for her? Is it fair for her to expect him to spend his life waiting for her calls? There are a few brief scenes of fast-paced sci-fi battle action, but mostly the film concentrates upon Mikako's and Noboru's thoughts; their reminiscences of their brief time together, and her memories of Japan's pastoral countryside in summer and winter.

The visuals of Mikako and Noboru calling each other across interstellar space on their cell phones rather than via higher-tech communication equipment is improbable, but the physics of the limitations of light-speed communication is still valid and this romantic conceit emphasizes the emotional bond between them.

This featurette is 25-minutes. A.D.V.'s DVD does not include the Japanese 80-page booklet, but it does have an additional 75-minutes of video extras: the complete original version of Voices with Shinkai and his fiancée performing the voices; Shinkai's She and Her Cat in three versions ("digest," three-minutes, and a full five-minutes); a video interview with Shinkai; the original production animatic for Voices; and four separate trailers for the Japanese video release. This may be overkill, but Voices and She and Her Cat alone are worth the price.