The Works of Makoto Shinkai
I got bored of animé for a while, but now I like it again, and part of the reason I like it again is that I rewatched Makoto Shinkai’s works She and Her Cat (which you can watch here), Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days (aka. Beyond the Clouds), five, thirty, and ninety minutes long respectively.
There are several aspects common to all of these, such as a relationship between a boy (or a cat) and a girl, a theme of separation and longing and getting on with life in spite of them, and a sort of intangible sentiment along the lines of “I am here / awake / alive” or, rather nicely put at the end of She and Her Cat, “this world… I think we like it.” There is also this incredible purity of vision in each of them that comes from the fact that, the first two at least, were almost exclusively the work of Shinkai who wrote, drew, animated, and voiced She and Her Cat and Voices of a Distant Star himself, with his wife providing additional voices and his friend composing the music.
In each of these there are some really heart-rending moments, my favourite of which is in The Place Promised in Our Early Days where the protagonist is talking about living alone at university; how, in a city where nearly thirty million people lived, there was no one he wanted to spend time with; how he would sometimes stand for hours at the train station pretending he was waiting for someone; how he had moved there so that he would no longer be able to see the distant tower that was the literal ‘place promised in their early days’, but on clear days it was still visible and it reminded him of the girl Sayuri; how he comes slowly to the realisation that though Sayuri is far away and unreachable, she is still dreaming of him as he dreams of her.
These beautiful moments are accentuated by Shinkai’s splicing together of single, mundane and yet evocative shots in quick succession, such as a classroom, a train carriage and some steps the characters used to walk up when they were younger. Unfortunately I think Shinkai’s work is almost undermined by his imagination which, although it produces some novel situations in which the characters are separated from each other, occasionally borders on the absurd. For example, in Voices of a Distant Star, which is set in the near-future after aliens attack the Earth, the female protagonist decides to join the army and pilots a mech into space still in her school uniform. Naturally this leads to some typically animé space battles, but it also creates a unique kind of separation: because her unit is following the aliens to their home planet in the next star system, occasionally at faster-than-light speeds, her text messages, which are her only means of communicating with her distant lover (though you have to question the roaming charges on that, and even which provider’s willing or able to carry texts across the galaxy), take longer and longer to be delivered. At first the delay is just a few days, but by the end of the short film, when she’s on some planet in Alpha Centurai, it takes a few years for the messages to be delivered. Not only that, but because she’s been travelling so fast, she has only aged by six months, while back on Earth her lover has grown several years older, and has given up waiting for her messages. It’s very sad and very beautiful, but also a bit silly.
The other thing I feel lets down Shinkai’s work a bit is his character designs. They’re well-written, but in the lush environments he draws, they often seem flat and angular and under-detailed. I suppose they’re not terrible, but after the fluidity of Studio Ghibli’s character animations, and even the similarly realistic designs in Neon Genesis Evangelion (which, by the way, seems somehow more credible when it blends mech-fighting with drama and deep characterisation), they seem lacklustre. Then again, I think Shinkai is an amazing environmental artist, demonstrated particularly for me in a this one scene in The Place Promised in Our Early Days where the boy and Sayuri are riding the train home together. There is a single shot that lasts for perhaps a minute or more where the viewpoint looks out from the luggage rack and the characters are only tiny figures in the bottom-left corner at the other end of the carriage. Their dialogue can be heard over the rhythmic clack of the train’s wheels, but the only movement is the scenery outside the windows and the regular beads of light that run along the metal supports and fixtures before flickering and dying at their ends. The whole scene is so beautifully drawn and detailed that you just want to soak it all in, and there’s several images like that throughout.
As you might have guessed by the length of this post and my possibly hyperbolic statements, I’m a fan of Makoto Shinkai. In fact, I would go so far as to say that The Place Promised in Our Early Days is one of my all-time favourite animated films and, as I tend to with almost all my opinion pieces, I highly recommend it along with both its predecessors, even if animé isn’t usually your thing. Also, I apologise if that started to sound like a primary school essay:
“Even though I think the character designs aren’t very good and a tower that tall and two kids building a high-tech plane is a bit silly I think The Place Promised in Our Early Days is very good and I would recommend it and I would give it nine out of ten.”
Tags: Beyond the Clouds, distancing, Makoto Shinkai, mech, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Relationships, Separation, She and Her Cat, Studio Ghibli, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, Voices of a Distant Star
