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Voices of a Distant Star Directors: Makoto Shinkai, Steven Foster Number of Items: 1 Format: Animated, Color Running Time: 30 minutes Studio: A.D. Vision Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2003-06-10 Buy from Amazon

Customer Reviews: Total numer of reviews: 69 Average rating: 4.0 "Great DVD" I bought this DVD a couple days ago, not expecting much, but boy, was I surprised. This has to be one of the best animated film-things I have ever seen. It had a great plot, animation was decent, and the music fit it perfectly. So....What is it about, exactly? Well, there are two teenagers in love, though they haven't admitted it yet. The girl, Mikako, is chosen to be in the U.N Army. She has to leave Noboru and go out to space, but she him e-mails a lot. The distance between the two grows larger, up to the point where it takes 8.6 years for a single e-mail to get back to Earth. Well, I'm not going to say anymore. If you really care, you should go buy this DVD now. "This is Beyond Anime" I would give it less stars if I looked at this DVD and was disappointed by it's short lenght, which is about 30 mins. It's not a big epic story anime with great character development or that much of any plot or action at all. I am only looking at the film for what it is. It's a short indy anime film with gorgeous art work and sheer poetic expressions of the creator. The film was almost all entirely done by one person. "Voices of a Distant Star" and it's DVD extra called "She and her Cat" are two beautiful stories of unconditional love that transcends beyond the loneliness of time, space and even words. Definitely touching and worthwhile to own. "Monolithic Virtuous Prestige Filled Wonder. My God!!!!!!!" Okay I was at my local Blockbuster looking for something to rent, bored out of my skull and then out of nowhere all of a sudden I see Voices of a Distant Star. Just like the man who finds a diamond and doesn't even know it's worth I rented this film, and I am exuberantly glad I did. All right the back story first, in the not so distant year 2039, a NASA expeditionary force is sent to Mars, this survey unit then discovers an alien city on Mars. The Tarsian City begins to be explored, but something goes wrong, someone fires first, it is unknown who did it, the humans or the Tarsians, but the Tarsians end up killing off all of the explorers, thus a giant galactic war begins. Come seven years later, two middle school lovers, are trying to figure out their lives, as the U.N. Space Force is getting ready to send massive space ships, and robotic killing machines called Tracers, to fight a fleet of the Tarsians. This is the beginning of our story. Flash forward to this awesome OAV (Original Animated Video) Voices of a Distant Star is not just an anime, it is the best film I have ever seen, and that is saying it mildly; if a live action two hour film like this came out here, it would have easily won all the Oscars, again putting it mildly. It captures more emotion, drama, depth, and beauty than any movie, series, or even novel has been able to do, in but thirty minutes, I'm not kidding. It gets even better because one guy did it on his Power Macintosh G4/400 MHz computer. Do you know what this film is? A masterpiece! In the way of Leonardo Di Vinci's Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. This film really puts to shame companies here who spend hundreds of millions of dollars, with thousands of people working on a film, it makes them all look like fools, because none of their films could even come close to this. As for Disney they should just close their animation studios, they haven't come close to making something like this and you know what they never will. Looking at all the horrible garbage that people call films here in the U.S., we've missed out on the greatest things, it is like we do not know any better than the garbage we get fed, heck I'm so fed up I'm just going to watch anime for the rest of my life from now on. So what are you waiting for, would you skip out on the love of you life? Go out already and buy it. "Good things come in small packages" It was only through the advice of a good online friend of mine that I managed to watch this movie a year or so before the DVD came out here in America. I immediately and whole-heartedly fell in love with this piece of amazing work crafted all by one man one his own personal computer. One comment you will hear again and again when asking others for their thoughts on this particular piece is "It was too short." Many allude to this and also add that it seemed stifled, that there was a lack of a good ending because of it. However, I think many let the ideal of such a short movie get in the way of their actual judgment of the contents. It's easy to look at a movie, see that it runs for a mere 25 minutes and thus say, "Well, it must be a bad movie if it's /that/ short." Voices of a Distant Star (Hoshi no Koe) doesn't feel like a small movie. The storyline moves rapidly but not at a pace to leave one confused. While the fight scenes do get a little complex and, at times, confusing, the overrall result of the movie is one of a beefy, intricate plot that could have been told in an hour long movie or in a 26 episode series beautifully condensed into 25 minutes. It is a very simple story with a simple lesson to be learned and thus may detract some viewers. But, at the heart and core of the film lies a story that hit straight to one's soul. We love no matter where we may go, even into the stars. Even if you may be skeptical, you owe it to yourself to at least give this movie a chance. It may, as it did me, change some of your perspectives on life, love and the manners in which we take distance for granted. "WELL ANIMATED.................TOO SHORT" To be honest,this is the best when it comes to animation. The problem is its too short (25 min)+(5 min)bonus anime. Due to its short lenght it ends without a meaningful ending.