Voices of a Distant Star
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| I hated it at first (in 2012), but now I found it quite watchable. 3,5/5 |
| Woulda been better without the terrible 3D space battles. The last few minutes were kinda touching so it wasnt all bad. |
| It was kind of boring for me. I had to watch this during a Japanese class and I wish the teacher chose a more interesting movie for us to watch. |
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Meddigo said: This is my favorite of Shinkai's works. It shows the whole star-crossed lovers that are forced apart in a much more realistic light. For one, they actually message eachother. One of my prime faults with 5cm/s was that after the whole train escapade and they find out that she's moving, they never once make an attempt to communicate with eachother. Whereas in Voices, the two, while only recently boyfriend and girlfriend, obviously care for eachother and text eachother with what's going on in thier life. I could sympathize much easier with these characters than I could with those of 5cm/s (except for surfer girl, I felt sorry that the guy totally just ignored her). It's a sheer feat that in 25 minutes, we get more story, drama, and character growth than some anime don't even get close to reaching in 50 episodes. Voices of a Distant Star is a touching masterpiece. I agree with you. I actually enjoyed this more than both The Garden of Words (close, but slightly beat it out) and 5CMPS. Maybe it was because I had the lowest expectations for this one so I ended up pleasantly surprised, whereas 5CMPS didn't quite meet them and Garden of Words only met them. Yes, this one was shorter, and yes, this didn't allow for as much time to get to know the characters, but I think everything on this was really well done (other than the admittedly poor animation, though this is 13 years old now). I also didn't get why communication halted in 5CMPS, and I liked that the effort between the two characters continued in this one. I found it very touching and rather emotional for sure. I don't know if I'd quite call it a masterpiece like you, but I would say that it was very, very good; 8.5/10 from me. |
| I liked the story, but the artwork and sound kinda brought my enjoyment down a little. I didn't really feel much from these characters. I think I'll check out the manga too in the hopes that it is better. |
"Be the change you wish to see in the world."  |
| Very bad, awful even. 1/10 it was terrible and honestly - adding mecha to shit anime isn't enough to make them better. you can't expect people to eat shit just because you add some honey |
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| Damn it I'm almost crying QQ The ending was sad :( |
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nerohigh said: Jigero said: animation made me turn it off after 10 minutes, this is horrible Agreed. I thought the character design was subpar. And who the hell lets a 15 year old pilot a mech? Evangelion has 14 year old pilots. |
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| Before: Hey I'm in a good mood today. Let me pick up this random OVA. Hmm, Makoto Shinkai? I think I've heard that name somewhere befor--oh who cares? Let's watch! After: I...I don't...why did I... This was mesmerizing. Very atmospheric and beautiful. Had no idea about the one man army tidbit, I seriously thought this was a higher grade production (well minus the character designs and battles). Usually I'm not a fan of stand alone OVAs due to the time constraints, but this one delivered the essentials surprisingly well. Obviously it could have benefited from more episodes/entries, but it conveyed a very profound tale of two people in love and the pain of being pushed worlds apart (literally). Despite its bitter aftertaste, I liked the ending. The idea that no matter how far apart they are, they were able to communicate instantly by thinking the same things. 7.5/10 |
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| Good OVA but it missed some positional. The concept with the distant messages traveling through space and having one character outgrowing the other is a great idea but it just ends with no real closure which is a turn off for me. There's no denying though that the short soundtrack and some of the scenes for an anime that was made in 2002 were amazing. |
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| This OVA totally obliterated my heart. The level of emotional depth was something I did not expect. Unfortunately, I can only give this a 6/10 because I think there was a tad bit too much crammed into just 24 minutes. |
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| ooooooooookaay... Glad i wasted my time watching this masterpiece... 8/8 |
| So, they have mechs that can traverse the galaxy, yet have phones that are from the fucking late 90s and early 2000s. OK. 2046 looks like one hell of a time to live in. I didn't like this at all; it came off trite as all hell. Them waiting for each other over long, protracted years, not even considering it is an exercise in futility, is way too platitudinous of a theme for me. Such an extreme notion of love is unrealistic as well, considering the age they fell in love with each other, the time in which people change the object of their affections flippantly. Maybe Shinkai realized how ridiculous the idea of this OVA was when making 5 cm/s, which felt like him reconciling himself to the fact LDRs usually never work. Not to mention the entire thing looks like shit. The CGI gets a free pass as CGI, especially at that time, still had its training wheels on. My issue was when character heads just seem to morph into different shapes with every shot. 4/10, at least it was less than an hour long. There were some well made fragments sparsely found throughout the film too. The shot of the flower petals drifting through the window as the guy was resting on the desk was neat. |
KatoBytesSep 5, 2016 3:42 PM
| Why do people have such bad taste? Anime isn't subjective anymore. |
| Man, this hits close to home! When I joined the Army I had a girlfriend I had limited communication with. This was back when there wasn't much communication allowed. We had to send actual letters to each other which would take so long. Eventually we decided to separate for the best but it was so similar to this anime. Through the years and far away... |
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KatoBytes said: So, they have mechs that can traverse the galaxy, yet have phones that are from the fucking late 90s and early 2000s. OK. 2046 looks like one hell of a time to live in. I didn't like this at all; it came off trite as all hell. Them waiting for each other over long, protracted years, not even considering it is an exercise in futility, is way too platitudinous of a theme for me. Such an extreme notion of love is unrealistic as well, considering the age they fell in love with each other, the time in which people change the object of their affections flippantly. Maybe Shinkai realized how ridiculous the idea of this OVA was when making 5 cm/s, which felt like him reconciling himself to the fact LDRs usually never work. Not to mention the entire thing looks like shit. The CGI gets a free pass as CGI, especially at that time, still had its training wheels on. My issue was when character heads just seem to morph into different shapes with every shot. 4/10, at least it was less than an hour long. There were some well made fragments sparsely found throughout the film too. The shot of the flower petals drifting through the window as the guy was resting on the desk was neat. Best review ever 10/10, couldnt express it better. btw does this Shinkai guy have any other story pattern or are the rest of his movies identical to 5cm/s and Hoshi no Koe just with better wallpapers? |
SpaghettiSpikeOct 26, 2016 5:20 PM
 Oshii is probably the only director that loves dogs. He thinks he's a dog himself. That's right, its slime! It will dissolve your clothing slowly before my eyes! |
| To me it was ok. Nothing special. :) |
| "The future is always blank. Only your willpower can leave footsteps there." "Ruling over death means ruling over life. Death is the climax of life. To have the best death, you must honor life." |
| Why do you recruit high school students to defend the fucking Earth? There wasn't anybody else more appropriate on a planet with 7 billion people? Anyway, I don't blame Makoto. Some part of me liked the idea, though that robots were absolutelly bad animated and the character design weird. After all, it's a 24 minutes show of characters missing each other. 5/10 |
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| I thought it was Ok. I find it interesting how Makoto Shinkai has moved farther and farther from sci fi over time. Maybe it's because he got burned so bad with this one. This is a very early 2000s view of what the future might hold. Not yet able to wrap their heads around smartphones and tablets. So dumb stuff like using a Motorola while floating around in a mech in space. Or Newspapers with little screens instead of photographs on the front page. My reaction to this is kind of my reaction to the OVA as a whole. Kind of charming for what it is. But also really dated and frustrating. In the whole OVA all I cared about was admittedly the center of the story. The middle school sweet hearts sending each other texts over the vastness of space and time. I got some serious feels when the dude got the text that was like "Hi 26 year old boy, I'm 15 year old girl." Like Jesus didn't expect that one to hit me as hard. Reminded me of the first Gunbuster all over again. I will say though it is kind of funny one of Makoto Shinkai's earliest works is the most absurd incarnation of his star crossed lovers formula. And you can see the groundwork for a lot of his later classics. Especially 5 Cmm Per Second. |
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| This anime looks almost as rip-off of Top wo Nerae! Gunbuster (1988-1989) [OVA][6 ep-s]. |
| Pupupupu~ |
| A pretty strange and surreal story with a quite unique art style. I enjoyed it tho |
| “I love heroes, but I don't want to be one. Do you even know what a hero is!? For example, you have some meat. Pirates will feast on the meat, but the hero will distribute it among the people! I want to eat the meat!” - Monkey D. Luffy |
| Overall i really liked it, however there were two things keeping me from giving it more than an 8 The character art was terrible even for the time Very little explanation for the ending. |
| Even in 2002, Makoto Shinkai's work still impresses me... Though of course there're flaws in a 2002 OVA such as this. This is a beautiful story between 2 couple separated by (literally) lightyears of distance between them. The feeling of isolation is delivered well. Such a loyal relationship between them is really sweet, yet sad to see. Especially how the OVA ends. If Mikako is still alive, then one day Noboru will eventually meet her... |
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| I guess that Shinkai was already Shinkai from the start. What a beautifully poignant OVA. He would also use this theme of two people, once close, growing apart. Trying to keep alive a feeling through distance and time in another work. The character design wasn't beautiful though, and the background shots were the most beautiful part of this, visually speaking. Those cell-phones stood out like a sore thumb when they had the technology to chase after aliens far beyond the Solar System though, but welp. |
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| yeah im gonna be real honest and say i didn't like a majority of it good intention and message through it all, but like a lot of things didn't make sense. the gear to travel through the universe, but this girl is using a phone my aunts probably used in the 2000s. not to mention that it can still send messages lightyears away from earth? yeah man, not for me. |
| wow, this was super boring. But well, it was Makoto´s Shinkai debut, good thing he improved eventually |
| :v |
| First of all I would this was not a bad start especially with the story was unique and had that Makoto vibe with it, 2 things that was really bad was the CGI and the character design for the CGI I don't blame them since it was released early 2002 and probably that was the best they could do, but the character design was just ugh ... well as for the ending I didn't get it if her battleship was destroyed or not, 5/10 |
| So I finally watched this, one of Shinkai's early works. I came in here with high expectations but at the same time not really knowing WHAT to expect. I am a huge fan of Shinkai, he is my favourite in the entire industry, and I want to see all of his works. Needless to say, this was great! From an animation perspective, it had problems. Specifically, the characters. The characters look weird honestly, but almost everything else was still beautiful, especially the scenery! Not sure how I feel about the mecha or the aliens. This does feel like an early Shinkai work, like something he would make when he was still starting out. Although it is indeed awesome that he did this all by himself (the animation), that doesn't make the character art good or better than it really is. Nonetheless, we should definitely give him lots of credit for doing this on his own because the story was still touching and more importantly it was like any other Shinkai work, exploring something. Making an animation by yourself, and 20 minutes of it at that, is really difficult and most people wouldn't be able to pull it off. So we should definitely give kudos to him for that! The art was beautiful and the soundtrack too, but as always I think the core of it lies in the story and/or the theme(s) Shinkai explores. It was a really sad story, and I felt so much sadness during and after the film. I think the girl didn't really CHOOSE to go. Maybe she was drafted or pressured or even forced to join? Not once did she seem like this was something she wanted. The waiting and waiting felt unbearable. First, it was several months. Then, it was a year. Finally, it was EIGHT years? EIGHT? It was already hard waiting several months, and then a year was even worse. But eight is almost a decade. In eight years you could go through all of high school, that's a lot of time. I don't know how either of them stayed strong for that long. I don't know how Noboru stayed sane and didn't fall into depression knowing that the person he loves is going to contact him AT THE LATEST eight years later. I don't know how he didn't develop feelings for anybody, how he could still hope. She's in battle, what if she dies in those eight years? And the same applies to Mikako. How could she live like that? She must be really really strong. In that battle near Pluto, if she didn't send the message, it would've been eight years. That's something so depressing. How can you go on living not knowing whether you're going to meet him or even get home ever again? Being far away, not just because of distance but also because of time, is something so depressing. I think that this shares a lot of the same theme explored by Shinkai in 5 cm/s, albeit in a more fictional and shorter form. It's about distance and communication. The only real thing connecting those two is that email system that keeps getting longer and longer. I can't say yet whether there was a message to this or was it just exploration, and if there was I don't know what it is yet. But after watching it, I just think that it was still beautiful. Shinkai really showed his potential back then and his potential turned out to be real true. A great work, Shinkai. Looking forward to watching more of your works. But seriously, did she die at the end? Drifting off like that? I'd be more depressed... T_T |
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| i enjoyed this OVA very much, beautiful scenery not so beautiful characters, well i liked it overall |
| The manga was so good...i wished I've never seen this anime...it ruined everything. So badly directed. |
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| Didn't like it, unnecessarily sad. Always distant love theme with this Makoto guy. Shoe peddler anime was better. |
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| Terrible movie. 3/10 |
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| Didn't convey anything to me. It was really bland. But, gotta love the classic train stop scene. Makoto Shinkai has really trademarked that stuff lol. |
| i liked the 'distanced love' story. but that's about the only thing i liked. other than that there is literally no progress in the story. its just the same thing: fight, send email before going farther, tries to make you emotional, repeat. i would've felt at least a little more emotional if the anime showed more of a connection between the 2 MC's. like memories or somethin. and even if they did, i would be too distracted by looking at the horrible character design which is heartbreaking to even view. the sounds sound so annoying. especially those phone beeps. the ED at the end wasn't something special. just meh. the OST wasn't touching nor emotional. it was just meh. the characters are literally just a flat piece of paper. they don't change. they don't develop. they just sit there. this is just disappointing .-. 3/10 |
3099Dec 30, 2020 5:50 PM
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| It was pretty shitty. Both art and animation were horrible. Story is ok...long distance shit... Nothing special. Ending is unsatisfying. Plus technology advanced but mobile phone model was still old school...especially the ship one...lol. Also I don't get how the female mc talked to herself...is it some sort of dream... Hallucinations shit |
  Click for a anime mashup! Still not gone bandwagon u, keep crying. Here u are welcome to CRINGE at my EXISTENCE |
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| I fall asleep while watching this movie , very boring and animation is horrible Overall rating : 3/10 |
| Don't be too hard on the animation. Makoto made this himself with no real budget on a MacBook. Watching someone's passion project come to life was pretty cool. The Distant love story does tug on the heart strings as well. Overall rating: 7/10 |
| I guess people wouldn't be so hard on this if Shinkai didn't get a position as director on more successful anime movies, a position that more talented people in the anime industry haven't landed even to this day. I, however, love cheesy over-the-top 90's stuff like this even if it doesn't even make any sense at all. So I'm not really sure if I can rate a work like this. |
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| Character designs were subpar but the backgrounds were really beautiful. I didnt like the mecha part of this but the romance aspect was great. Depressing ending. I hoped the girl would survive but i guess that didnt happen |
| Didn't find it really appealing ngl. It was somewhat confusing. They have cool ass mechas but they still use those old ass flip phones? |
 β βββββ β£ βββββ β "Everything I've witnessed... This whole system you have built has always rejected me. Now I'm ready to reject it. That's why I destroy. That's why I took this power for myself. Simple enough, yeah? I don't care if you don't understand... That's what makes us... Heroes and Villains." β βββββ β£ βββββ β |
| Really amazing... I didn't though it would touch my heart... Just only 25 minutes were enough to make me stare the ceiling for minutes... 8/10 |
| Haven't found a good anime dialogue to copy yet!! |
| Decent premise, ridiculous execution. |
| Eh, it was alright, there's only so much sappiness a 24 minute anime piece can have. The character designs were atrocious though lol. 6/10. |
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