Animanga/Novel Information
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Animanga/Manga Information
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is a
Japan ese
Anime OVA by
Makoto Shinkai . It chronicles a long-distance relationship between a teenage couple who communicate by sending emails via their mobile phones across interstellar space. The series has been broadcast across Japan by the anime
Satellite Television network,
Animax .
''Hoshi no Koe'' was written, directed and produced entirely by Makoto on his
Macintosh computer. Makoto and his fiancée provided the voice acting for the working dub. (A second Japanese dub was later created for the DVD release with professional voice actors.) Makoto's friend
Tenmon , who had worked with Makoto at his video game company, provided the soundtrack. Shinkai and Tenmon had earlier worked together in the making of ''
Kanojo To Kanojo No Neko '' ('She and her Cat'). The duo later also collaborated in the 2004 release of ''
The Place Promised In Our Early Days ''. This half hour OVA also represents the "long distance" relationship between Makoto Shinkai and his wife, as Shinkai spent often long hours in the studio and communicated with his wife via text messaging.
In July 2002,
ADV Films announced that they had licensed ''Hoshi no Koe'' for
U.S. distribution and would release the 30-minute short as "''Voices of a Distant Star''." The finished DVD premiered in May 2003 at
Project A-Kon in
Dallas, Texas . The DVD version also includes his earlier work, ''
She And Her Cat ''.
A middle-school girl named Mikako Nagamine is drafted to the
UN Space Army in a war against a group of
Aliens called the Tarsians, named after the Martian region (
Tharsis ) where they were first encountered. As a Special Agent, Mikako pilots a giant bipedal robot or
Mecha as part of a fighting squadron attached to the spacecraft carrier
Lysithea .
When the
Lysithea leaves Earth to search for the Tarsians with Mikako on board, Mikako's boyfriend Noboru Terao remains behind. The couple continues to communicate across interplanetary, and eventually interstellar space via the e-mail facilities on their mobile phones.
As the Lysithea travels deeper into space, the e-mails take increasingly longer to reach Noboru on Earth, and the time-lag of their correspondence eventually spans years.
The plot loosely resembles the 1975 science-fiction novel
The Forever War by
Joe Haldeman . It is also thematically similar to the Cordwainer Smith short story, "Ms. Helen America and Mr. Gray-No-More."
The narrative begins in
2047 . Mikako is apparently alone in a hauntingly empty city, trying to contact people through her cell phone. She finally says, in an empty classroom with stacked chairs, "Noboru? I'm going home, okay?", a rhetorical question which is answered with a busy line on her cell phone. Then she wakes up to discover that she is in her mecha orbiting an alien gas giant. She then goes to a moon or planet in the background, the fictional 4th world of
Sirius System, Agartha.
In the middle of the anime proper, she sends an email to Noboru (which shows the date
2047 -
09-16 ), with the subject "I am here", saying "to the 24 year old Noboru, from the 15 year old Mikako" (in reference to time dilation, see below) which would only reach him 8 years, 224 days and 18 hours later, and just hopes it reaches him. Some flashes of imagery, perhaps indicative of memory, a hallucination, or even a mystical encounter, are then shown. It is a morphing character that looks like a younger Mikako. While they're speaking however, that character morphs into a Tarsian and then into an older version of herself. The same room where she woke up in the beginning of the animation is presented again, with the same ambience, but this time she is squatting in the corner, sobbing and pleading with her
Doppleganger to let her see Noboru just once more time to be able to say "I love you" to him.
The other being says "It will be all right. You will see him again". The ship's alarm starts warning her that the Tarsians suddenly coming from everywhere. Mikako cries even more, yelling "I don't understand!". A climactic battle ensues. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Noboru receives the message, albeit almost 9 years in the future. A voice-over dialogue commences between the two of them which functions as a synchronous
Soliloquy on the same subject. Meanwhile, back at Agartha, three of the four carriers equipped with the warp engines which brought the expeditionary force to Sirius have been destroyed. The Lysithea is still intact after Mikako joins the fight and stops its destruction. After winning the battle, Mikako lets her damaged mecha drift in space.
Some interpretations concede that Mikako will not return from space, in as much as the remnants of her fleet would have jumped through space back to the Earth by the time Noboru receives messages eight years later, however
Special Relativity would concede that those 8 years have already passed for the crew of the Lysithea throughout the course of the movie. This means that rather than skipping through time, Mikako simply experiences it faster than Noboru, aging her less and causing her messages to lag between her FTL travels.
Headlines in newspapers seen in Noboru's apartment and announcements on board the Lysithea suggest that the means by which the fleet navigated between planets and systems was disrupted somehow and the fleet would have trouble finding its way back to Earth.
It is possible that Noboru and Mikako were eventually reunited in space, as at the end of the film Noboru joins the space armada, and will apparently be part of the second fleet which will continue the search for the Tarsians.
Other versions, including the storylines in the associated
Manga and novel, have decided that Mikako's spacecraft warped a distance of more than 8
Light Year s from Earth, thus causing the eight year transmission time of the final message. It is implied that Mikako did indeed survive the final battle along with elements of her fleet, but would have to make their way back to Earth through slower means due to the loss of their warp engines.
One reading of the Tarsian's attack is that it is a part of their plan to force humanity's evolution and development through war.
The story addresses issues of deep space travel such as signal propagation speed,
Relativistic Time Dilation , simultaneity and frames of reference.
In the novel version, the FTL jumps have no effect on the passage of time;
Special Relativisitic effects during the return voyage, however, do play a role, with Noboru aging more than Mikako by the time she returns to Earth (the
Twin Paradox ). As in the anime, Mikako's SMS messages propagating at the speed of light arrive back on Earth before she does.
By the time of her arrival back at Earth, Mikako would probably be younger than Noboru since less time will have passed in her
Reference Frame during her sublight speed return to Earth due to
Time Dilation . Additional esoteric effects due to the FTL jumps are also possible but not explained or considered due to the many unknown aspects of
FTL Travel , though some have speculated on the possibilities of time travel with Mikako arriving back to Earth before she left.
- Voices of a Distant Star (30 Minutes)
- Voices of a Distant Star (soundtrack)
- ---Music by Tenmon / Lyrics by K. JUNO
- She and Her Cat (Short Film, 1 Minute, 3 Minutes, 5 Minutes)
- Interview with Makoto Shinkai
- Voices of a Distant Star (Director's Cut, Alternate Vocals, 30 Minutes)
- Voices of a Distant Star (Original Production Animatic, 30 Minutes)
- 4 Original Japanese Trailers
There was a
Manga Serialization based on the series in ''Afternoon'' magazine from
Kodansha in Japan. It was run monthly from
February 2004 to
December 2004 . The story of the manga begins at the same point as the start of the anime and carries the story a little bit beyond the anime itself. Makoto Shinkai wrote the manga, with illustration work done by
Mizu Sahara . The manga was translated into English by
Tokyopop .
