[Tyto]

Voices of A Distant Star/Hoshi no Koe. 30 minute debut sci-fi short film of Makoto Shinkai, the same director/animator behind 5 Centimeters Per Second, and the film The Place Promised In Our Early Days. A little quirky, subtly nerdy, and fairly cute romance that takes the term star-crossed lovers a tad out of context with literal interpretation.

When two lovers find themselves separated by a distance that takes even near-lightspeed transmission anything from weeks to months to send messages, the lag between messages grows longer and longer, until the time it takes to make contact through a text message extends to what seems like an eternity.

The sound track is simple but beautiful, and the film itself makes fantastic use of the music to accent the many elaborate scenery shots that Shinkai has become somewhat [in]famous for. His digital paintings can be absolutely breathtaking at times, and the over all tone of the film in addition to the ambient music makes for a real treat. Strangely the pacing seems remarkably slow, and despite being just a 30min long film, you may well walk away swearing it lasted a full ninety minutes.

The nerd in me also just has to point out that the concept of the film hinges around a concept pertaining to spacial relativity, as defined by the proposals of Einstein. The specific idea played upon is what's called the "Twin Paradox" -no, it has nothing to do with the paradox twins from the duelist kingdom arc of yugioh- which states, to put it simply, that if given two individuals(perhaps say, twins) one of whom you send traveling away from earth at greater-than-light speeds, the other of whom remains on earth, that should the first return to earth he will have effectively aged less than the relatively stationary twin. Replace those twins with relaying text messages traveling at those same theoretical speeds and you've got this movie's chief gimmick.

Also it has giant mecha fighting against aliens...