Voices of a Distant Star



Voices of a Distant Star (ほしのこえ, Hoshi no Koe, lit. "Voices of a Star") is Makoto Shinkai's first major work. This short film was released in 2003 and is considered one of the most poignant Anime romances around. However, it is better known for the the fact that Shinkai scripted, drew, animated and produced the entire movie on his own.

Fourteen-year-old Mikako Nagamine and her friend Noboru Terao had looked forward to attending high school together, but when humanity declared war on the mysterious alien force known as the Tarsians, she was drafted by the UN Space Army to serve as a Tracer pilot in the task force assigned to the Lysithea. Mikako leaves Noboru behind on Earth as the UN Forces pursue the Tarsians deeper into space.

During their separation, she communicates with Noboru via email, but as the fleet travels farther from the Earth, the transmission time grows increasingly longer, until eventually Noboru must wait years for any word that Mikako is even still alive.

In addition to the short proper, a variety of adaptations and supplemental materials exist. A drama CD was released a few months later. A light novel by Waku Ooba was also published the same year. A manga illustrated by Mizu Sahara began serialisation in 2004 and was published as a compiled volume in 2005. There is also a second novel by Arata Kanoh, Words of Love/Across the Stars, which was initially published in 2006 but would not get an English translation until 2019. This one digs deeper into Mikako and Noboru's individual perspectives.


 * Alien Sky: From Agartha's surface, the sky is a green tinge and at least one of its moons are visible.
 * All There in the Manual: Those who missed the newspaper headlines in the movie's finale might misinterpret it as either a Downer Ending or a bittersweet one. However, those headlines report the Lysithea's victory at Agartha. Additional details like Noboru's Navy uniform in the closet suggest his eventual reunion with Mikako. The supplementary Novelization states outright that the Lysithea won the battle, but their FTL drive was damaged beyond repair, so they have no choice but to call for help and wait eight years for the message to reach Earth.
 * Asteroid Thicket
 * Benevolent Precursors: It is implied the Tarsians attacked humanity to and challenge them as a species.
 * Bittersweet Ending:
 * Blade of Fearsome Size: The Tracers possess a powerful beam saber that can be used to.
 * Can You Hear Me Now?: Mikako's phone is piggybacked to the Lysithea's communications array and allows her to send mail even when she's outside of our solar system.
 * Child Soldiers: Mikako is decidedly of the precocious variety, being the only member of the fleet's crew to appear in the anime.
 * Cool Starship: The Lysithea and its sister vessels of the UN Navy possess a warp engine and beam weaponry that can curve at right angles to hit enemies.
 * Disappeared Dad: According to Words of Love/Across the Stars, Mikako's father "stopped coming home", but whether he ran out on the family, died away from home, or something else is not elaborated on.
 * False Camera Effects: This aspect is particularly impressive and demonstrates Makoto Shinkai's attention to detail, giving the anime a greater degree of realism.
 * Fantastic Romance: The degree of separation between Mikako and Noboru is a consequence of FTL Travel.
 * Foreign Language Theme: "Through the Years and Far Away" (performed in English by LOW aka Yuuki Mizusawa) is played during the final battle.
 * FTL Travel: The UN vessels like the Lysithea are capable of FTL travel using warp engines, although they lack the FTL communications capabilities to complement it.
 * Ghibli Plains: The Tracers make planetfall on vast, seemingly peaceful plains with alien fauna and flora.
 * Good Is Not Soft: Mikako may have a tender heart, but that doesn't stop her from bloodily cutting Tarsians up or Goomba Stomping them to deliver a Coup De Grace.
 * Gray Rain of Depression: It is raining when, after a year of Mikako being incommunicado, Noboru tries to gather the resolve to let go of her. Later in the film, it is raining on Agartha when the stress Mikako has been experiencing boils over and she breaks down.
 * High-Pressure Blood: Tarsians bleed in dramatic delayed-reaction jets of it.
 * Humongous Mecha: The suits deployed by the UN Navy are called Tracers.
 * I Will Wait for You: Noboru struggles a great deal with whether or not to keep waiting for Mikako, and tries to give up on her a few times. Ultimately, the trope is subverted when he chooses to follow her into space.
 * Laser Blade: Energy swords are part of the Tracer's combat load-out.
 * Limited Wardrobe: Mikako still wears her school uniform while fighting Tarsians, contrasting the expectation that pilots would be supplied with plugsuits.
 * Long-Distance Relationship: Mikako and Noboru's eventually spans lightyears.
 * Macross Missile Massacre: The Tracers wield missile pods as part of their load-out.
 * Magic Skirt: The skirt of Mikako's school uniform stays down even in zero-g.
 * Mind Screw: Late in the film after having made planetfall on Agartha, Mikako sees and interacts with what appears to be an older Alternate Self with a wedding ring. Whether this is a hallucination, a psychic attack from the Tarsians who attack physically shortly afterwards, or something else is never made known.
 * No Ending: The anime is rather open-ended. The manga adaptation adds some resolution.
 * Opposite Gender Protagonists: Mikako Nagamine and Noboru Terao start out as students at the same middle school until the former becomes a Humongous Mecha pilot for the Space Navy while the latter remains on Earth. Their struggle with their relationship, which can only be maintained via email that lacks Subspace Ansible - thus resulting in ever-increasing delays - drives the story.
 * Rain Aura
 * Ringworld Planet: The Lysithea briefly docks at a ring-shaped structure apparently built around one of Jupiter's moons. Words of Love/Across the Stars states that it's Europa.
 * Roboteching: Ships in the Lysithea task force use their particle cannons to great effect against the smaller Tarsian mecha: the cannons are mounted in groups and fire beams that can curve at right angles.
 * Scenery Porn: The landscapes and attention to detail are staggering; terrestrial locations within the film were designed from actual locations in Japan.
 * Short Anime Movie: The running time of the film is 25 minutes.
 * Shout-Out:
 * One scene has characters waiting at a railway crossing as train carriages marked "UN Spacy" pass.
 * The planet Agartha shares a name with an older occult concept of hollow Earth.
 * Starfish Aliens: The Tarsians have an anatomy similar to those of starfish
 * Subspace Ansible: Inverted; while UN spacecraft are capable of FTL travel, they lack FTL communications. Ironically, a newspaper near the end of the film reports that the generation of starships built after Mikako departed will have the FTL communication capability that the ships of her fleet lack.
 * Surprisingly Good English: The Computer Voice of the Lysithea is voiced by a native English speaker (Donna Burke, the same actress who later provided the voice of Raising Heart in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha), and thus her pronunciation and intonation are flawless, although the word ordering is unusual in some places.
 * Theme and Variations Soundtrack: In the soundtrack notes, Tenmon remarks that he essentially created the soundtrack by writing a "Theme A" and "Theme B", and then made variations on those two themes to provide appropriate background music for every scene.
 * Time Dilation: The fleet has FTL travel, averting this trope. It merely takes an increasingly long amount of time for Mikako's messages to reach Noboru as she travels farther from Earth due to the lack of FTL communications technology; she compares it to twentieth-century air mail.
 * Time Skip: The narrative skips back and forth between Mikako and Noboru, covering a period of about six months on her side and more than eight years on his.
 * Time Travel Romance: While no time travel is involved, the lack of FTL communications means that the past Mikako is, in effect, sending messages to the future Noboru.
 * Umbrella of Togetherness