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Description:
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Boy meets girl. Aliens attack Earth. Girl joins mecha force. Guy stays on Earth. Girl goes away to fight aliens. Guy stays stuck on girl.
I have completely summarized the plot of this movie in those sentences. Feel cheated? I do too.
Actually, I don't feel cheated, but you probably would if you did more than rent this movie from Blockbuster. This 24 minute GIANT of a movie is another one of my classic examples of "great idea, but poor execution".
Having bought this as a "collection" with "The Place Promised in Our Early Days" for 30% off the market price, I am not going to complain so much as I am going to jeer that this Makoto Shinkai makes the rough equivalent of two and a half anime episodes and he gets his own collection. By that standard I should have a graphic novel filled with all of my random superhero doodles from when I was six.
Okay, okay, I'll cool it.
The basic premise falls back to an "aliens attack Earth and we fight back" type story. The EPIC TWIST is that instead of the male lead leaving to war, it is the little girl.
The main part of the story, mecha junkies, is actually romance, sorta. There is an innocent love between Mikako (the girl) and Noboru (the boy), which started in middle school, and continues over the course of the movie. It's endearing as Noboru tries to live from text message to text message (Yeah, seriously) from his distant love. As she warps from planet to planet, her messages take longer and longer to get to Earth, which sorta almost makes sense.
Sights and sounds
So we have flawed, or at least imperceivably difficult science, and no romantic payoff. There is no action, because the emphasis of the movie, despite its "lush 3d animation", is not on mecha battles, and there is no romance due to the tragic nature of the love. In fact, most of the "not mecha" scenes, are scenes of Noboru pulling a Luke Skywalker in the nameless hills that surround his Japanese high school campus. When someone actually does do something, the animation looks like it was all done in Flash. Wonderful animation indeed.
What I CAN say for the piece is its soundtrack, which comes included with the DVD. It is actually pretty enjoyable, despite how much that onanism of the actually movie disappointed me.
Bottom Line
If you have a free movie rental at Blockbuster, and you just aren't in the mood to check out "Gingerdead Man", or "Bad Santa 3", then you might want to give this a look, but neither mecha, nor romance, nor school yard drama, this movie is otherwise epic fail.
Final Verdict: 3.2/10
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Keywords:
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hoshi no koe, long-distance relationship, interstellar space
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Sound & Graphics:
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Average
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Entertainment Value:
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Poor
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Replay Value:
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Horrible
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Plot:
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Average
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Genre:
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Mecha Romance
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Episodes:
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1
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Studio:
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Comix Wave Inc.
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Anime Online
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a cool anime...if only they could make it longer and more action packed...
