Reviews

An amazingly good yet deeply flawed movie, is more or less how I would describe it. This blows Makoto Shinkai's previous work, Voices From a Distant Star, out of the water, though it lacks the levels of baseless emotional melodrama that made Voices so popular. So, briefly, this is the opposite of Voices. Voices was about two lovers drifting apart, and Place is about three friends coming back together. It includes a romance between two of the friends. What gives this show emo credentials is that they surmount all sorts of odds to reunite and fulfill a childhood promise. Power of friendship, rah rah, someone out there cried at the end, I know it! However, Makoto is so invested in his world of hyper emotion that the movie loses all reference to our reality. If you said out loud among company “keeping a promise you made with your loved one 3 years ago is worth risking the entire world over,” hopefully you would be laughed out of the room. Besides this, there are also plot issues (what is the motive behind the tower, how is such an important character (Sayuri) kept under such low security, what does she have to do with the tower anyways (the “grandfather designed it” line explains nothing)? Arguably, these parts of plot aren't that important, so we can let that go.

The artwork was fantastic, though I personally didn't particularly like the character designs. My only complaint about the otherwise amazing art is that I think it was a bit too detailed, too clean, too sterile, too computer overloaded. Lots of computer evidence can be found in the abundance of geometric forms. It's hard to explain, but it should make sense when you view his artwork. The gist of my complaint is that it doesn't have the human touch that I feel most great art has. The new Evangelion movie was computer overloaded too, but it still felt human. Speaking of, the computer room scenes looked like they were ripped right out of that show, I'll consider it a cute allusion, not plagiarism ;) Much ado has been made about the music, and I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't even notice it (except a certain scene involving a violin). Apparently I didn't notice a lot of other things. A flaw in the movie is that one has to pay extremely close attention to catch a few critical plot points, and at one of these points I was eating kind of sloppy chips and salsa, maybe my attention was too divided because for a while afterwards I was confused.

I never got too into the characters. Suffice to say, they were too simplified for me to really connect. Some things haven't really changed since Voices. Unlike Voices, the pacing was erratic, which slightly killed the mood for me.

In the end, we have a technically impressive movie which too often substitutes emotional bullshit for real character development and storytelling, attempting and failing to incorporate science fiction, and is clumsily paced. If Voices is a C, this is a B. Makoto Shinkai has tons and tons of potential, but a few weak points in his direction that need to be addressed before he walks in the league of the greats.