Hoshi no Koe

Hoshi no Koi or Voices of a Distant Star is a short OAV from Makoto Shinkai of Places Promised in our Early Days and 5cm Per Second fame that was released in 2002 in Japan and 2003 in America.

   This half hour story is about the strains long distance relationships suffer. Set in a distant time Mikako Nagamine finds herself enlisted in the UN Space Army as a mech pilot to fight in the war against an alien enemy. The only way to remain in contact with her boyfriend, Noboru Terao, while away from Earth is via email on her cell phone. Once she is done with her training she is deployed to the front lines, far from earth. As she travels to her location she continued to email Noboru. Due to the increasing distance between them the emails take longer and longer to reach their intended targets. From Mikako’s perspective the duration between her emails are short, to Noboru the time between them begins to expand rapidly, first taking days, then weeks, then months and finally years in between each message. While she is in the far reaches of space battling the enemy and opening her heart, detailing her experiences to her boy friend, he is growing older and more distant from her physically and emotionally, until he begins to move on with his life.

    This is a haunting and beautiful mix of hard sci-fi and heart wrenching romance. This OAV was my first introduction to Shinkai, who has become one of my favorite directors in the world of anime. The animation is beautiful and well detailed, steeped highly in real life. The mech designs and combat scenes would fit in any of the best mech stories. It is a combination that is done frequently but never quite succeeds. Where Gundam and other such shonen mech titles try and incorporate romances into the story of interstellar war and mech fanservice, Hoshi no Koi delivers a beautiful and depressing romance with excellent mech action. What is even more incredible about the movie is that is was done entirely by Shinkai himself. The only outside assistance he had was with the sound engineering. This was the first official release by this talented man and it won him a number of awards and helped propel him into the industry as a force to be reckoned with. If you want to see a well done story about the inevitableness of tragedy check this short out. The American DVD includes Shinkai’s original animation short, A Woman and Her Cat which is also haunting. I think someone needs to sit this man down with a therapist.