released 20 jul 03 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* The anime DVD VOICES OF A DIFFERENT STAR consists, essentially, of two short pieces, a half-hour item titled, unsurprisingly, VOICES OF A DIFFERENT STAR, and a five-minute short titled SHE AND HER CAT.
VOICES OF A DIFFERENT STAR takes place in a few decades and is a character study of two Japanese youngsters, Makiko and Noburo, sweethearts since childhood. Makiko joins a UN space force to fight a mysterious alien enemy, the Tarsians, from whom the humans have captured starflight technology, and the story focuses on the time-lagged communications of Makiko and Noburo as Makiko travels over light-years. SHE AND HER CAT is a sketch of a relationship between a cat and his mistress, as seen from the point of view of the cat.
Both these stories are atmospheric in flavor and very sentimental, to the point of suffocating melancholy, and focus on relationships and not action. In short, they are "shoujo (girl)" stories, which is fine in itself if not entirely to my own taste. The production values are good -- with some fine mecha battle scenes,(and I'm not a big fan of the whole idea of mecha -- if a bit eccentric, in that background details are rendered very neatly while the character designs tend toward the rough side.
While this is a creditable and conscientiously-made video, the fact that the buyer only gets about 35 minutes of entertainment out of this DVD is still unsatisfactory, and the fact that it is loaded with a "Director's Cut" (really only with different Japanese voice actors) and a preproduction "rough" doesn't really make it much more satisfactory -- it just seems like padding. The whole story of the Human-Tarsian War strikes me as providing a lot of good material to mine for further stories, and it would be pleasant to have a DVD collecting VOICES and two or three other features on the same theme. Hopefully at some time in the future we'll get such an item.