Voices of a Distant Star (Hoshi no koe)
Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai
ADV Films, 2003
25 minutes
Available at Blockbuster (DVD format only)

Comment

"Voices of a Distant Star" does not qualify as Mormon art per se, but raises some peripherally related issues. One is OSC's "Ender's Game" (in endless pre-production, it seems), which I'm convinced could best be done as Anime. It is a subject that Anime has long experience with, culminating perhaps with Hideaki Anno's psychological deconstruction of the post-modern warrior child in his fantastically bizarre "Evangelion."

Another is the treatment of pathos and loss as it relates to Mormon art, especially in light of the general feeling that a) you were probably bad and had it coming; b) get over it already; c) from Anne of Green Gables:

ANNE: Can't you even imagine you're in the depths of despair? MARILLA: No, I can not. To despair is to turn your back on God.

Of course, to experience loss is not necessarily to despair. That should be the difference that faith makes. But despite the admonition in D&C 42: 45 ("Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die"), we seem to approach it as a problem in need of a swift fixing or a swift platitude. There are no extended rituals of mourning in our culture, for example, such as the Japanese Obon.

What has stuck in my mind about "Brigham City" long after seeing it is that it is a Mormon movie, not so much about death and tragedy, not about how everything's okay because we've got the Plan of Salvation. But fundamentally about loss. Maybe that's why it didn't sell better to Wasatch front audiences. Nevertheless, I don't think we can -- or should -- avoid the fact that there are things that can be irretrievable lost to us -- and perhaps lost for eternity -- yet without it destroying faith, or love or beauty. We want the double-your-money-back Job version.

Review

"Voices of a Distant Star" (Hoshi no koe) is less a film than a narrative poem that holds up well after repeated viewings. I have consequently spent more time with this particular DVD than any other title in recent memory, despite the fact that the running time of the feature is less than 30 minutes.

The story echoes plot elements from "Ender's Game," told in the style of the "mecha" Anime genre. High school student Mikako has been mustered into a space armada as a battle robot pilot, charged to track down an alien invasion force that destroyed the Mars colony. As the pursuit draws the armada further away from Earth, from lights hours to light years, Mikako's increasingly poignant email messages home take longer and longer to arrive. Through distortions of relative time and perspective, Mikako stays the same age while boyfriend Noboru, aging "normally" back on Earth, is left to pine.

It soon becomes not a story about space invaders, but about the division of two souls clinging to thinnest tendrils of hope, hope that is condensed into a few shared words separated by years of silence. A strange thing words are, that can communicate so much hope when there is so little to hope for. The result is a kind of cinematic haiku. The emotions it engenders could more precisely be described as a'wa're, the classical Japanese aesthetic concept of loss and transitory beauty, suggesting "an anguish that takes on beauty or a sensitivity to the finest -- the saddest -- beauties."

The existential nature of the story is partially explained by the fact that Makoto Shinkai created the whole thing on his (considerably enhanced) desktop computer, a mix of digitized hand-drawn cells and computer-generated animation. It's no slap-dash effort, either. The foreground animation is understandably minimalistic. The 3D animation isn't Pixar, but it's nothing to frown at. And Shinkai's background mattes are gorgeous, even breathtaking at times.

He eventually partnered with a commercial studio to handle the post-production and marketing. And the American distributor (veteran Anime importer ADV Films) has taken Shinkai's work a step farther. Thanks to the magic of DVD technology, you can choose from Japanese (with subtitles) and an English dub track. Rare for me for other than Studio Ghibli productions ("Princess Mononoke," "Spirited Away"), but I recommend both versions. The English dub is above average, and it's fascinating to compare it with the literal subtitles and the original Japanese.

(There is a second Japanese track as well, the original "scratch" track, but I think somebody messed up the indexing because tracks 2 and 3 are the same. The real scratch track can be found under the "storyboard" option in the Extras menu.)

A good dub, after all, requires a rewrite by somebody who can actually write, which is not the same as being capable of producing a competent translation. Science fiction great Neil Gaiman, for example, was hired to rewrite the "Princess Mononoke" dub. There's sort of an artistic Heisenberg uncertainty effect going on here. Once you start to mess around with the source material -- especially when moving between quite different cultures -- the final product will inevitably change, and better to admit that going in.

The end result is that the dub and sub end up as two often quite different retellings of the same story. The full impact of the last five minutes, very much a remarkable work in free verse, demands viewing in both languages.

Also included on the DVD is a similarly moody short titled "She and Her Cat," cut three different ways, and a (clumsily subtitled) interview in which Shinkai talks about making movies the same way that the novelist creates a work that is completely independent and individualized. Though that reminds me of the historian's quip in a Benjamin Franklin documentary, to the effect that Franklin's autobiography can be considered the first best-selling self-help book, except that many of its readers have failed to take into account that Franklin was, well, a genius.

It's one thing to be talented at writing, or drawing, or editing; quite another to be equally and productively talented at them all at the same time. The day of the desktop auteur I don't think has yet arrived. But Shinkai, at least, is hard at work. He has a new film coming out at the end of the year, "The Place Promised in Our Early Days." Like "Voices of a Distant Star" and "She and Her Cat," from the descriptions I've read, it's got that refined a'wa're melancholy written all over it. Shinkai has definitely found his oeuvre and is sticking to it.

Eugene Woodbury