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Hoshi no Koe (ほしのこえ, Voices of a Distant
Star) is a 30-minute
Japanese
anime
OAV.
In Hoshi no Koe, Earth is at war with the Tarsians, a race of
aliens. A high school girl, Mikako Nagamine, joins the U.N. Space
Forces to fly a giant
mecha. She soon has to leave Earth and her friend Noboru Terao behind.
As the army follows the Tarsians on their retreat, the distance between
Mikako and Noboru grows and thus, the short
text messages Mikako sends to Earth with her
mobile phone take longer and longer to send across space. In the end,
the messages take eight years, but Noboru still waits for Mikako's return.
The anime focuses on the bond between the two through their
very-long-distance relationship, rather than on the space battles that
Mikako must fight.
One of the primary reasons that Hoshi no Koe is often
well-regarded is the fact that it was almost entirely created by one man,
Makoto Shinkai. He wrote, drew and directed the story by himself and
digitally animated it on his home
Macintosh computer over the course of six months. In the original
Japanese dub, Shinkai and his fiancιe even provided the voices. (A second
Japanese dub was later created utilizing professional voice actors.) The
music was created by the composer, Tenmon. Shinkai and Tenmon also worked
together in the making of the anime
Kumo no Mukou Yakusoku no Bashou (The Place Promised In Our Early
Days) and
Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko (She and Her Cat).
In July
2002,
ADV Films announced that they had licensed Hoshi no Koe in
the
U.S. and would release the 30-minute short as the translated "Voices
of a Distant Star." The finished DVD premiered in May
2003 at
Project A-Kon in
Dallas, Texas.
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