Voices of a Distant Star
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- Hoshi no Koe redirects here. Hoshi no Koe is also an album by Nobukazu Takemura.
Voices of a Distant Star (星の声, ほしのこえ, Hoshi no Koe; translation: "Voice(s) of a Star/Voice(s) of Stars"), (2002) is a half hour (24′20″) Japanese anime OAV by Makoto Shinkai. It chronicles a long-distance relationship between a teenage couple who communicate by sending emails via their mobile phones across interstellar space.
Hoshi no Koe was written, directed and produced entirely by Makoto on his Macintosh computer. Makoto and his fiancée provided the voice acting for the working dub. (A second Japanese dub was later created for the DVD release with professional voice actors.) Makoto's friend Tenmon, who had worked with Makoto at his video game company, provided the soundtrack. Shinkai and Tenmon had earlier worked together in the making of Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko ('She and her Cat'). The duo later also collaborated in the 2004 release Kumo no Mukou Yakusoku no Basho (The Place Promised In Our Early Days). This half hour OVA also represents the "long distance" relationship between Makoto Shinkai and his wife, as Shinkai spent often long hours in the studio and communicated with his wife via text messaging.
In July 2002, ADV Films announced that they had licensed Hoshi no Koe for U.S. distribution and would release the 30-minute short as "Voices of a Distant Star." The finished DVD premiered in May 2003 at Project A-Kon in Dallas, Texas. The DVD version also includes his earlier work, She and Her Cat.
Plot
A high school girl called Nagamine Mikako is conscripted by the UN Space Army in a war against a group of aliens called the Tarsians, named after the Martian region (Tharsis) where they were first encountered. As a Special Agent, Mikako pilots a giant bipedal robot or mecha as part of a fighting squadron attached to the spacecraft carrier Lysithea. When the Lysithea launches to pursue the Tarsians with Mikako on board, Mikako's boyfriend Noboru remains on Earth. The couple continue to communicate across space using the email facilities on their mobile phones.
Due to relativistic time dilation, as the Lysithea travels deeper into space, Mikako's emails take increasingly longer to reach Noboru on Earth. Eventually, the delay between their correspondence spans years.
The plot loosely resembles the 1975 science-fiction novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
The story actually begins in the middle, in 2047. Mikako is dreaming that she is alone in an empty Earth, trying to find people through her cell phone, in a dream atmosphere in a kind of heaven nightmare where everything is too quiet. Still on the dream, she says "Noboru? I'm going home, okay?", which is answered with a busy line on her dream. Then she wake up remembering that she is in her mecha, right before entering in the planet in the background, a fictional 4th planet on Sirius System, Agartha.
Later by the middle of the animation, she sends an email to Noboru (where it shows the date 2047-09-16), with the subject "I am here", which would reach him only 8 years, 224 days and 18 hours later, and just hopes it will reach safely. Some flash of images, maybe memory, are shown. Then there's the only communication in the whole animation with a 3rd character, which could be a Tarsian or maybe just some dream of Mikako. It is, regardless, a morphing character that looks like Mikako, but younger. While they're talking, that character turns into a Tarsian and then into an older herself. The same room where she woke up in the beginning of the animation is presented again, in the same way, but this time she is sitting in the corner, crying, and asking her "clone" to see Noboru just once more, to be able to say "I love you" to him.
That other person says "It will be all right. You will see him again". A smaller flash of images comes and everything goes back when the alarm starts warning about Tarsians suddenly coming from everywhere. Mikako cries even more yelling "I don't understand!". There comes a big war, meanwhile Noboru receives the message, almost 9 years in the future, and there comes almost a dialogue between the two of them, more like synchronous talking same subjects. 3 out of 4 spaceships equipped with the warp engines that lead her to Sirius are destroyed in the war, and it's not clear if the 4th survived or not, but when everything is finished it only shows Mikako's mecha lost in space, with no arms, and their last words: "there is probably one thing we would think. Say Noboru..." and then both say "I am here", although Noboru's voice is only heard on "here".
Their last dialogue is almost like one person talking alone, but interpolated with her and him saying each part:
- Mikako Nagamine: Say, Noboru... we are far, far, very, very, far apart ...
- Noboru Terao: ... but it might be that thoughts can overcome time and distance.
- Mikako Nagamine: Noboru, have you ever thought about something like that?
- Noboru Terao If... if for even one instant something like that could happen what would I think? What would Mikako think?
- Mikako Nagamine ... say, there is probably one thing we would think. Say Noboru ...
- [Both]: ... I am here.
Interpretations
Some interpretations concede that Mikako will not return from space, because her fleet would have jumped through space back to the Earth by the time Noboru receives messages eight years late.
Other versions, including the storylines in the associated manga and novel, have decided that Mikako's spacecraft warped a distance of more than 8 light years from Earth, thus causing the eight year transmission time of the final message. It is implied that Mikako did indeed survive the final battle along with elements of her fleet, but would have to make their way back to Earth through slower means due to the loss of their warp engines. Vorlage:Endspoiler
Relativity and Time dilation
The story addresses issues of deep space travel like signal propagation speed and relativistic time dilation.
In the novel version, the FTL jumps have no effect on the passage of time; special relativisitic effects during the return voyage, however, do play a role, with Noboru aging more then Mikako by the time she returns to Earth (the twin paradox). As in the anime, Mikako's SMS messages propagating at the speed of light arrive back on Earth before she does.
By the time of her arrival back at Earth, Mikako would probably be younger than Noboru since less time will have passed in her reference frame during her sublight speed return to Earth due to time dilation. Additional esoteric effects due to the FTL jumps are also possible but not explained or considered due to the many unknown aspects of FTL travel, though some have speculated on the possibilities of time travel with Mikako arriving back to Earth before she left.