Forum - View topicVoices of a Distant Star.
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saizni
Posts: 2 |
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I've seen Voices of a Distant Star so many times. I think it's kinda sad how the chick can't see the dude for so long. Do you think they should make another ending for it like a 2nd DVD or something?
I was to know what you think. I don't know about you, but I kinda liked the movie. Even if it was low budget and kinda cheesy. |
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one3rd
 Posts: 1818 Location: アメリカ |
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Here's what I wrote in the comment for it in My Anime:
Even though I said it's a nice little story, the reality is that there isn't much of a story. It's 20 minutes of "I wish you were here" in the middle of a war that's pretty much lifted straight from Gunbuster. |
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Tony K.
 SubscriberModerator  Posts: 11440 Location: Frisco, TX |
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I saw this a few weeks ago for the first time and don't see what the buzz is about.
Sure it's sad, but 24 minutes just isn't enough for a one-shot title to catch my attention. Perhaps if it were several episodes in length or at least in movie format, it'd probably be infinitely better with all of the emotional dialogue and scenarios they could've written in, a la Saikano. Pretty good production values and writing, but I still only gave it a So-so. I am, however, pretty curious to see The Place Promised in Our Early Days now. Storyboarding, directing, and camera work just from Voices alone were pretty good. But like I said, it's just too short for me. I need time to get into the characters and see something develop a little better. |
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adonais
Posts: 302 |
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I thought "voices" was pretty fantastic, and was rather amazed at how well it played despite being so short. I put great value in the ability to tell something beautifully in a limited space without dragging on and on (I deplore series, books or anime, that just go on forever milking the audience for more money by each instalment, usually sacrificing quality and storytelling greatly).
Anyway - it seemed to me that I really didn't need to have their backgrounds detailed any more than that to perfectly know where they're coming from. As human beings, they seemed as average and uncomplicated as can be, and having watched enough anime by now, I can easily supplement the missing backstory myself if need be (but it is not). Anyway - my 2c is, it's a great short story, and I wouldn't change the ending for anything in the world 
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adonais
Posts: 302 |
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Well. Have you ever gone to an art gallery and found yourself lost in a Caravaggio or a Delacroix, just staring at it for an hour, imagining the thoughts, feelings, history, hopes, fears and desires of the people in the painting? I feel that way about "voices", an instant frozen in time like a portrait, left for us to admire at a distance. Of course, the laws of special relativity causes time to flow at intersecting rates in this particular portrait, and the laws of anime require at least 25 minutes of air time 
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selenta
Subscriber Posts: 1774 Location: Seattle, WA |
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Well then, I guess I'll speak on behalf of it. I loved it, easily in my top ten. Perhaps it's because I've always loved that sci-fi stuff, but I absolutely loved this. When I saw it for the first time, I was depressed; later that day I went back and watched the two minute trailor for it, I'm not joking, I couldn't stop crying for 10 or 15 minutes. I've certainly cried watching anime before, sometimes in places I probably shouldn't have, but this one got me crying harder than Air did. I still can't watch the trailer without getting choked up. The dialogue wasn't the most witty or genius I've ever heard, but it did feel very genuine to me, and that's probably why it got to me like so. The pacing is perfect, the music is fantastic, and while the animation is rather lackluster considering the original was done by one guy on his home computer, the directing is pretty good.
This is one of those very very few anime that really addresses some of the realistic aspects of space travel that most others don't touch on. Particularly, the distance. Unless we discover some bizzarre way of communication faster than light with entangled atoms or something (I don't think it's going to happen, being a physics major), the issue of communicating with people beyond our solar system will be a major problem. If an issue occurs and help is needed, or they're simply trying to keep in touch, the farther from home they get, the more unrealistic it is in a human lifespan. Humans obviously only live for so long, and to communicate a single message may take a significant portion of said person's lifetime. By the time the message is recieved, the reciever will probably be living a completely different life, and by the time the message arrives back here, the original sender may be old and gray. Space isn't something where we can zip around fly between planets on a whim for better job opportunities; living on a different world isn't just a phrase, it really is living completely unconnected in any way to our planet, for better or worse. I'm a space nut to be sure, which is probably why I love this so much, it hits all the right nerves for me: as realistic a relationship given the circumstances as possible, space, war... absolutely no question it's my favorite OVA only show. |
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Azathrael
 Posts: 745 |
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The realism is really what separates Voices of a Distance Star from similarly-themed anime. Sure, the whole robot thing might still be far away or simply impossible or impractical. What's realistic is the relationship between the two, how it's portrayed, how it evolves, and how it's concluded. As much as I thought Saikano was sad, it wasn't the kind I could even begin to think of as "practical" or "possible".
I strongly recommend The Place Promised in Our Early Days. The artistic quality alone makes it worth it... There were a few scenes where I wanted to take a screenshot and make it my desktop background. :) |
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selenta
Subscriber Posts: 1774 Location: Seattle, WA |
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QFT. I was gonna edit my post, but Azathrael said my point better than I did... so I thought I should give him a little credit 
Either way, if you like Voices, I just saw another futuristic OVA that's not liscensed the other day. I downloaded it on a whim because of the rave review it had on some fansub site, and was actually really impressed with most of it. The CG backgrounds are fantastic and extremely moody (think GitS 2: Innocence). It's called Pale Cocoon, and if the ratings tell you anything, at the very least, it's "not bad". |
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ManOfRust
 Posts: 1935 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I am an avid reader, and I have always enjoyed immersing myself in a great novel. In recent years, I have been reading more short stories, and at first it was a bit of an adjustment getting used to the different format. Sometimes a short story may just be one scene, with just a few characters. Sometimes you don’t even get any backstory or any conclusion. The author is just trying to evoke a certain feeling or emotion, or just wants to explore one specific concept, or get the reader to consider one idea in a different way. I see Voices of a Distant Star as the anime version of a short story. There is not time for a great deal of character development. We don’t really get to see how the story ends. We don’t get much background on the war. A lot of things are left for us to fill in on our own. Without the luxury of a 2 hour movie or a long TV series, the story has to be boiled down to its core exploration of separation and whether love can endure. I think it succeeds greatly in this purpose. The story is emotional and beautiful, the animation is limited by what the creator had to work with, but is pretty nonetheless, and the wonderful music serves well to help tell the story and maintain the intense emotional atmosphere. Voices does require us to fill in a lot of what is missing with imagination and is stripped down to its core task of evoking an emotional reaction and causing the viewer to consider the central concept it is trying to communicate. I very much enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the even shorter She and Her Cat which is one of my favorite anime works ever despite its brevity. If Voices is a short story, She and Her Cat is the anime version of a wonderful poem. The complete package of script, animation, and music tells a beautiful story and manages to invoke an emotional response, even in its shortest version. |
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undeadben
 Posts: 1212 Location: West Texas |
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I've also seen this very recently. I think that it gets its message across quite well, however in the telling of this particular subject matter there has to be a little more. I know that there is no time for character development in something like this but the way other short OVAs and movies combat this is in the way the characters are introduced and portrayed, even though they don't tell us anything, there is enough there for us to come to conclusions.
In Voices of a Distant Star, though we spend a lot of time with Mikako and actually have an opportunity to know her well, Noboru is rarely on screen and the few shots of him do not tell us anything about who he is. Without at least a hint of reason or motivation, there is nothing that we as viewers have to understand him. And the end result is that we end up not being vested on him in one way or another and it's hard to fully appreciate the complete story. Even a small show of indifference on his behalf would have spoken volumes and made this an amazing, though even more melancholy, story. All in my opinion, of course. |
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adonais
Posts: 302 |
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I guess that begs the question, when is a story "complete"? When you can write down the Schrödinger equation for every particle in the universe?  I guess that's taking things off-topic, no need to reply, just a philosophical question.
For my part it really did feel complete, however. And as I suggested above, don't you think he's just a normal guy like you and (well not me) some other normal guy; can't you fill in the blanks yourself?
If that had happened, it would still have made a great story I agree, but I would probably never have wached it a second time...(that's like swapping out a Mona Lisa smile for Munch's "Scream" - how much angst can you take? IMHO of course!) |
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undeadben
Posts: 1212 Location: West Texas |
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I feel a story is complete as it is presented by the creator, unless I know for a fact that it was left unfinished. What we each take with us after seeing that story is where possibilities abound. And I did feel this was a complete story, one with flaws, but complete nonetheless. I know you said you didn't need a reply, and I don't know anything about philosophy, but I do love to share my opinions.
Would a normal guy believe so much? How much patience would a normal guy have? Does his part in this really present him as a normal guy. I can fill in only so many blanks, after that it just becomes baseless speculation. We need clues in order to fill in blanks.
I was merely stating a possibility, and actually a possibilty that I would have been against, to try to express my opinion that even a more horrid situation, would have been better than an indifferent one. I can appreciate where so many people enjoy Voices, it has a real artistc feel, and as I said, I do think it gets its message across well, and it has a very interesting subject matter. I just find that the faults I saw lessened my own enjoyment of it, but that doesn't mean others can't appreciate or enjoy it. Oh, well I guess I'll stop here. I don't want to start a debate over this show. Apparently a lot of people have different views about it, and that is good. I always say that I think it's good that we each see differently, it keeps us from being bored. But I will read any response to my post. |
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Tony K.
Subscriber Moderator Posts: 11440 Location: Frisco, TX |
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That's a great point. And besides, the definition of a "normal guy" would vary from place to place. Take a look at most of the teenage guys in the U.S. You think they'd actually wait 8 years for a text message from a childhood friend that they just decided to start dating before she left to fight a war out by Jupiter and beyond? Not to say that I don't understand what Shinkai is trying to convey here, but seriously. If we're going to fill in the gaps with our own interpretations after the fact, the more "clues" we have, the easier it is to not accidentally screw something up. I mean, I could make up that Noboru sends back one last message, dies from depression, then have Mikako return with a few minutes of internal monologue only to have her breakdown in tears from the discovery and have the whole audience crying. Or, what if he decided to give up, finds a new love, starts a family, only to have Mikako return before she got the message saying he was starting over, and see her get so sad and depressed that she either mulls the entire time or commits suicide? However, I suppose if you get down to it, the rhetorical question of "how would you deal with this situation?" is basically all I'm getting here. If I look at it that way, it seems a lot more appeasing than to be left making up my own story when Shinkai went to so much effort to present a big part of it already. A lot of times, I try to enjoy the stories and work of these people (creators, writers, etc.) for what they are and how they're presented in their "full" context. But up to the point of where it ends I never like speculating beyond that because I then feel like I'm doing fanfiction, which I find disrespecting in most cases. In the case of Voices, I am only willing to acknowledge those 24 minutes that I saw and work with what I have. If we try to look at themes and not really concentrate on filling in those gaps, it would be much more concise in understanding the real message at hand. And now that I think about it, that's probably what I should've been paying attention to the most after reading some of these posts. I'll have to rewatch it a few more times now and see if that comes across with more clarity than I remember. |
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Kelly
Posts: 868 Location: New York City |
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Well, first of all, we have to take it for what it is - a short; not a full, drawn-out movie. I think we do get a pretty good idea of what Noboru is going through. Mikako is going through the terror of war and the stress of knowing that any day she might receive a "forever finally got too long" Dear Jane text after all she's gone through. Noboru is dealing with an entirely different situation - a far longer separation due to the time discontinuity and the denial of his instincts to marry and start a family at an age alot of people are starting to settle down. Mikako got more screentime, but Noboru's scenes, when they did come, spoke quite eloquently of his own dilemma - and the fact that we only saw how he was holding up intermittently helped us get involved in the suspense of wondering how long he would be able to hold out, given that unlike Mikako, he had the opportunity to get on with his life. I thought the juxtaposition of their situations was quite interesting, and for all it's a short, I think it's one of the best anime dramas I've seen. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18429 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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I've said this before on this site, but I think VODT is better because of its brevity, as that keeps the story very tightly-focused. (Whereas, by comparison, Place Promised felt like it was progressing at too leisurely a pace.) It's not the kind of story you could extend or stretch out without harming its beautiful simplicity, as it is solely focused on their efforts to continue an impossibly long-distance relationship.
I don't feel there are any gaps that need to be filled in, either. The story made it pretty clear that Noboru had moved on after waiting for several months because he felt that Mikako had left him behind, but receiving Mikako's pre-warp message brought him to the realization that A) he hadn't been left behind, and B) not only were his feelings for Mikako deeper than he had previously admitted, but so were hers for him. (The "like lovers" tag was an enormously telling comment.) His speech as Mikako warped out made it clear to me that he had decided that, based on those feelings, Mikako was worth waiting for, and he would have to steel himself to deal with the self-imposed loneliness while waiting for her. His and Mikako's comments over the last couple of minutes, where they reminisce about the finest details of their time together, only further supports that. And I'm absolutely convinced that it ended exactly where it should have ended. This was a melancholy story of longing all along, so a decisive or clearly happy ending wouldn't have fit. VODT ranks in my Top 10 all-time (maybe even my Top 5) for writing, and definitely in my Top 5 for all-time great anime romances. EDITS: Typos, and gods, I cannot believe I keep getting the main character's name wrong. Last edited by Key on Mon Oct 16, 2006 7:20 pm; edited 4 times in total |
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