I wasn't expecting Hoshi no Koe to live up to that legacy. It was one of Shinkai's earliest works, and it really shows. The sparks of greatness are there, but there's no material for them to set alight.
Overall:
If you don't expect the world from it, it's a pleasant watching experience. As a Shinkai fan I always find his earlier work fascinating, and with Hoshi no Koe being a short rather than a feature film I honestly don't feel like my time was wasted on it even with the low rating I'm giving it. If you're a fan of Makoto Shinkai and you have half an hour to spare... why not, you know?
Story and Characters:
Not the greatest. The concept, two young people who never confessed their feelings to one another separated by lightyears, is a fairly firm one. The execution just lets it down. We aren't given enough time with the characters to understand their motivations, or even why they like each other in the first place. A large part of this is probably the fault of the runtime being so short; we simply don't have time to spare getting to know these kids.
The problem with that is that without us as an audience being able to connect with these characters, when the attempts at tearjerking come in later it just falls flat. You can't get emotional over a character you know nothing about.
There are other issues with the story, but you can kind of suspend disbelief long enough to ignore them and others have covered it pretty well in their reviews anyway, so I'll not waste my time or yours rehashing it.
Art and Animation:
The animation is good, but the extremely dated and somewhat haphazard art style lets it down massively. The backgrounds, scenery, and lighting are all exactly what you'd expect from Shinkai even with the film being such an early work. The real problem is the character art, which looks very much like the kind of "anime" we all drew in our school notebooks when we were twelve. Yeah, you've got distorted faces when they move'; you've got enormous, dead-inside eyes; you've got suspiciously missing foreheads; you've got hair with no volume that just falls flat and lifeless... It's grim. It's really grim. And I know I'm not really being fair to it, given its age, but the thing is it's not aged well. Don't go into this film expecting it to look like Kotonoha no Niwa, that's all I'm saying.
Soundtrack:
Good! I enjoyed the music here, and along with the background/scenery art I'd say this film's soundtrack was probably its strongest element. A soft piano piece that played at one point put me strongly in mind of 5cm Per Second's main theme, which is one of my favourite pieces of film music (so that's high praise).
Enjoyment:
I enjoyed it. It was crude in parts, and it wasn't very sophisticated, but I'd say it was worth my time even just for the scenery and the concept. Yes, even though that concept wasn't immaculately executed, and even though that scenery often had horrifying mutant-humans in the foreground.
Maybe I'm biased, who knows.
