Thoughts Transcending Time and Distance: Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star

Shinkai created the film almost entirely on his own over a period of seven months, working mainly with consumer applications on a Power Mac G4. He even performed the voice acting, alongside then-girlfriend Mika Shinohara, for the initial screenings at the small Shimokitazawa Triwood theater in Tokyo in February 2002 (they were later replaced by professional seiyuu Chihiro Suzuki and Sumi Muto for the DVD release, which is the version available now). The film is certainly distinct from the later works that made Shinkai a global hitmaker, with more limited character animation and a story that is quite a bit more fragmentary and suggestive than the director’s feature work. Its narrative has no real beginning or ending, with the majority of the film structured as a sort of long audiovisual montage, its style reminiscent of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1963) or the experimental collage animations of Kelly Sears (The Drift, Voice on the Line); all are short-form works telling what could otherwise be large-scale sci-fi stories through intimate voice-over atop mostly still images of startling depth and composition. In Shinkai’s film, most of the motion within the frame comes during the CG-driven mecha sequences. That 3D animation is certainly impressive for an independent solo production, and was probably important in getting the attention of otaku enthusiasts familiar with “giant robot” anime for the independent theatrical premiere and later DVD release (which was a major success, selling 60,000 copies in its first year—a large number for a one-off anime title). Yet the CG bombast does not register nearly as powerfully as the parts of the film that more clearly define Shinkai’s identity as an artist: the sheer sensory detail of the characters’ day-to-day lives, on earth and in space, where the director’s detailed backgrounds and Tenmon’s evocative piano melodies tenderly illustrate the liminal spaces of longing within which these two teenagers find themselves abandoned.

Voices of a Distant Star remains a startling triumph of original artistic vision, perhaps the most confident and self-assured film Shinkai would make up until his blockbuster breakthrough Your Name. fourteen years later. Much of the director’s work in the intervening period feels like that of an artist experimenting with the tenor and boundaries of his own particular voice. His first two features—The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004) and 5 Centimeters per Second (2007)—play with ideas from their predecessor in longer-form contexts; the former expands on the contrasting of heady sci-fi with intense sensory detail and fragmentary storytelling, while the latter narrows in on the theme of communication, again featuring a separated boy/girl pair who bridge the gap through written words. And while these films have more concrete narratives, they follow Voices of a Distant Star in constructing themselves as impressionistic montages of internal reality, filtering their action through their characters’ thoughts and emotions. Elements of this sensibility survive into Shinkai’s later work as well, in the musical maximalism that bursts forth at critical junctures in Your Name. and Weathering with You, when the spectacular, cascading visuals and Radwimps’ irresistible pop songs sweep the viewers along into the heightened emotions of the teenage protagonists.

The mecha aspects of Voices of a Distant Star might feel incongruous to followers of Shinkai’s later career, since he has never returned to this subject matter again; a giant robot stomping through the stunning greenery of The Garden of Words (2013) or taking the characters of Suzume away from their cross-Japan road trip to a faraway solar system would be practically unthinkable. But the works Shinkai draws from here—like Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982), and in particular Hideaki Anno’s Gunbuster (1988), with which Shinkai’s film shares a time-dilation plot of the kind introduced to Hollywood much later with Interstellar (2014)—are also frequently focused on the themes that animate Shinkai’s career: of young people thrust into violent or untenable situations by the generations that came before, of technology mediating our relationships with each other and the world, and of love transcending time and space.

Shinkai’s protagonists are young people with minimal agency, unable to control the state of the world; their choices revolve around how to navigate the problems they have been handed and the disasters they been thrust into. In Weathering with You, the film I consider Shinkai’s crowning achievement, a girl with weather-controlling powers is made to believe she must sacrifice herself to correct the world’s climate irregularities. The boy who loves her boldly says no—that she has the right to live and exist in this world, come what may. It may be the defining narrative gesture of Shinkai’s career. There is an abrasiveness and quiet indignation lurking under the surface of his work, a despair over what we ask of young people in making them responsible for a world broken before their birth; it is a grief that gradually gives way to fury, to characters shouting for the right to live even in the fractured world they’ve inherited (a moment made literal at the climax of Suzume).

Born in 1973, Shinkai came of age just as Japan’s “economic miracle” ended and the country entered a prolonged period of economic stagnation in the nineties. His protagonists, like the adolescent target audience of his films and of most anime, have grown up in similar conditions, and amid the contemporary stresses of climate change and natural disasters like the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, an event foundational to Your Name., Weathering with You, and Suzume. Shinkai’s films ask the question confronting young people in the twenty-first century: how to live in a world that we enter just when it feels like it’s breaking apart at the seams.

Voices of a Distant Star is narrower in scope than Shinkai’s later work, but that twenty-first-century discontent is at work here too, in the sadness over the simple things that have been lost in Mikako being taken to space and turned into a weapon, in the longing for the quiet rhythms of daily contemporary life. The cell phone, the film’s central visual motif and symbol, is not just a vital lifeline between her and Noboru, but an umbilical tether to the ordinary tempo of her adolescent life back home, a piece of technology that mediates her communications and, more importantly, represents her ability to connect, a potentiality made more and more distant the farther she is drawn into deep space.

In the end, it is the simple, quotidian, yet ultimately quite powerful sensory details that draw the minds of these characters together, and bind their memories and desires across space and time. This, to me, has always been Shinkai’s calling card: An ability to draw reality with such startling attention to detail that his images can evoke memories of, say, standing on a train and texting on one’s cell phone, or walking home beneath crisscrossing power lines as the sky fades to dusk, with more palpability and immediacy than a photograph of those scenes might be able to convey. This is one of the wonderful things about animation, after all: that it allows an artist to draw not only the way something looks, but to imbue that art with the way something feels. That quality is all over Voices of a Distant Star, grounding the science fiction and rooting the mecha bombast to an internal process of memory and feeling. The film asserts that the simple bond forged between two young people in the midst of their ordinary middle-school life might be strong enough to transcend space, time, and an interstellar alien invasion. As is always the case for Shinkai, the rest is just background noise; it is those lovely little details of modern life, the ones we take for granted, that matter most of all, because when the pressure mounts and our emotions slip past our reason, they are the things we remember, and feel, most intensely.