The Place Promised in Our Early Days

After seeing the trailer at the ADV website, and knowing it was another Shinkai movie, I had to see this one, and it was just as good as I thought it would be. Hell, I'm almost willing to call it the best I've seen in the last few years. I can see now why some call Shinkai the next Miyazaki...if you think that is blasphemous to say, you ought to check out his works before judging that for yourself.

As much as I enjoyed Voices of A Distant Star (Hoshi no Koe), I found it too short. His animation style, the colors, the computer effects were all amazing...and even more so that he did the whole thing by himself.

Then he comes up with this masterpiece. Voices had an okay plot, but wasn't too terribly developed or interesting. This one is spectacular. It everything that Voices should have been...full length, proffessional looking, same beautiful use of computers to enhance colors, Shinkai's little trick of using real places in Japan to draw out buildings...it just blew me away.

Any anime fan looking for something fresh and beautiful should check this out, it is well worth the small amount of cash it will cost you. And if you are fortunate enough to live in one of the cities where its being shown in the theaters, I highly encourage you to see it there on the big screen.

The story is about three children and their quest to greater know the world they live in. This alternate universe takes place after WWII, except here the island of Honshu (the main island of Japan) and all southern islands came under US occupation, and the northern most island Hokaido came under control of the mysterious "Union", who in 1974 erected an enourmous tower for an unknown purpose. The two boys, and the one girl they both loved, Sayuri, promised each other that some day they would fly to that tower in the plane they built.

But then Sayuri falls into a mysterious coma, and the promise is delayed... I won't spoil the story, but needless to say its quite terrific and the ending quite satisfying.

Enjoy this one for yourself, trust me when I say its worth every penny.

Place Promised in Our Early Days / B0009PLMAS

*Spoilers*

The problem with philosophical movies is that one person's "Oh my, wasn't that deep and mysterious" moment is another person's "Good grief, this is boring, tedious, and inane", and sometimes there's just no rhyme or reason to it besides differences in character, history, and experiences between the two people. And then the person who didn't like the film goes on Amazon and explains why they didn't like it in order to aid people in their purchasing decisions, and inevitably comes off looking like a jerk for 'hating' on someone's favorite movie.

And yet, here we are. I wanted to like "Place Promised", I really did. Firstly, and while this shouldn't *matter*, it's still very impressive, the movie is absolutely gorgeous. Seriously, this is some of the prettiest anime I've ever seen - there's a scene where a ladybug alights on a girl's hand, and it's so lovely I just want to cry. And, really, I *love* the plot premise - the horror of being totally alone in an alternate reality that you can't wake from is exactly the kind of plot premise that messes deeply with your mind for weeks on end. As well as the dual persona of the two boys - do they save their friend and risk the world, or do they sacrifice an innocent for mankind?

So why two stars? Honestly, despite all this I just didn't enjoy the movie. The characters are so bland and badly characterized that I couldn't get into it and just ended up being frustrated. The boys in particular stand out for me - their characters are so poorly fleshed out, and so superficially similar, that I actually thought a Big Reveal was going to be that they were both two personalities for the same person, a la Fight Club, but no - it just turned out that they were poorly characterized and I wasn't supposed to notice.

The horror angle, also, which seemed so promising, was badly botched for me by the handling and execution. I don't demand complete realism in movies, but it would be nice to have SOME kind of Applied Phlebotinum to explain why all this is happening, outside of a bland, "Well, her grandfather worked on the tower...", explanation that explains nothing. Not to mention that the horror fell kind of flat when the researchers discovered so quickly and blandly what was going on - it's hard to feel that she's isolated and alone when everyone in the outside world knows her situation (even if that distinction doesn't make a difference to her).

Indeed, so MUCH of this movie just seems to be a "Simon says" of narrative acceptance. The populace at large regard the tower to be little more than an uncomfortable reminder of war or a lovely piece of scenery, which is so inhumanly bovine as to hurl you out of the movie on a catapult. I mean, imagine if we had a brutal war with Mexico or Cuba and then afterward they built a tower that stretched as far as the eye could see and could, oh I-don't-know, be used to stage long-range attacks against us at any point in time. I'm pretty sure the population's overall feeling towards it wouldn't be 'oooh, it's so shiny today!'. That's not even getting into the whole parallel universe thing - why would you want to overlap our world with a parallel universe? What's the goal? The point? Why is the government funding this operation? How did the tower sync up with our poor, beleaguered girl? We don't get answers to these things and while some people are going to find the lack of answers to be "deep" and "meaningful", it just rubbed me wrong in this particular case.

And, really, my intention is not to troll. If you loved this movie, good on you. But if you haven't seen this movie yet and are considering buying it at full price, take this review as a recommendation to rent first. That's all.

~ Ana Mardoll

I wanted to see this ever since I heard that it was done by the same director who created Voices of a Distant Star, and I have to say that it lived up to my expectations.

Every single frame of this piece looks as though it could be framed on the wall as art. It looks amazing. The attention to detail is astonishing.

But Promise is not just eye-candy. There is a story, told in subdued tones, and supported by a rich, lovely score.

A complex blend of romance, drama, and science-fiction, the narration on both the Japanese and English tracks is perfect.

This is a film that will change anime the same way that Akira did, but for vastly different reasons.