Rating: 
Summary: WELL ANIMATED.................TOO SHORT
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Animated Poetry
Review: I get upset when I read reviews of Voices of A Distant Star that whine about it being too short. 30 minutes is an eternity in terms of animation and it boggles my mind that Voices was made by a lone animator. Makoto Shinkai has created the animated equivalent of a one-act play or a novella, which will emotionally affect its audience for much longer than the duration of the work itself. The story is simple, poetic, and heart-wrenching. In 30 short minutes, Shinkai depicts a lifetime of emotion and I consider the film's brevity to be one of its greatest assets (Hollywood could learn a few lessons in this regard).
Rating:
Summary: nice but too short
Review: this is one very well animated movie.The problem is,its only 30 min which makes it more like an episode.
Rating:
Summary: Looking to the Future
Review: "Voices of a Distant Star" won several short anime awards not only in Japan, but in Toronto as well. The unedited directors cut of the short is approximately 30 minutes long, however the DVD also offers another one of Makoto Shinkai short films from 1997, "She and Her Cat", a pleasurable 5 minute short from the perspective of a cat and his love for his mistress.
"Voices" focuses on two young "lovers" who are split apart by Mikako's decision to become a mecha pilot to help defeat a strange alien race that had annihilated several Martian cities. As the distance between Mikako and Noboru grow, so too does their need for each other. Mikako has only her memories of Noboru to live through from trip to trip, fight from fight, but text messages Noboru as much as she can. Noboru has the text messages to look forward to day in year out. This frustrated love between Noboru and Mikako shivers with regret on both sides. As each day passes, Noboru tries to move on from his unrequited love Mikako, believing that she will never come back, not in this time, and not for him. Mikako lives day to day, eventually regretting her having ever left Noboru's side for something so trivial and self-satisfying.
The strained relationship between Noboru and Mikako, growing ever distant can leave an empty void in ones belly. The key emotions of the movie are played up so well within the short, that one cannot help but feel the pain of a lost but not forgotten love. Makoto Shinkai elaborates on the distilled love very well, a very emotional film.
I suggest "Voices" for the one who is looking for an impressive 3-D CG graphic anime that focuses on re-inventing direction with characters on a more personal and tragic view. This is a work meant to toy with new filming ideas, and Shinkai has managed to improve tension and bleed regret from animated characters in a stylistic enviroment that is picture perfect. Many ideas are explored in this film, and it is worth any enjoyer of anime's time and money.
Rating: 
Summary: It's what I was looking for in a short film
Review: It is short, though that's no crime. Blood The Last Vampire was pretty short as well and was quite an awesome movie. I rather liked it, but that's my opinion.Way back when... being on the other end of the world was a world away... often times correspondances took days, weeks, months to reach their destination. In the modern world, talking with someone on the other side of the world is but about 20 digits on a touchtone phone, a mere double click in an AIM window, an Email Send-button click away. So being literally a world apart is nothing for todays technology... would that be so if you were trying to have a long distance relationship with someone who lived on, oh say... Pluto? Well this movie explores that idea of old in a time of hyperspace travel, internet, cellphone email and other wonders... this movie rediscovers that feeling of distance that no longer exists for just about everyone. The first part of the movie introduces the two lovers and gives you a look at to what their life was like on earth. Watching both, the english and the japanese offers, in a lot of places, a different view of the two (being geared towards the culture that spoke the recorded langugaes). The rest of the story is basically an exchange of messages between the two of them. At first the messages take a while, a day or two to reach him. Then her messages start to take months, as the fleet moves farther away. The farther it moves, the longer the messages take. So while her messages are traveling to him, he's living, moving on. And then he recieves her messages after what seems like forever... messages sent from when she was younger that are just now reaching him. The small film puts emphasis on her pain and his emptiness and on both of their survivals. The DVD also comes packaged with a short called Her and her Cat. It's a cute short film about a girl that lives alone with her cat and is all from the Cat's point of view. I suggest watching the 5 minute version and practising on your speed reading before hand, it's all subtitled and it moves fast. It's a short film, nothing grand and drawn out... no completely breathtaking story. It's a short that presents a philosophical message, the old time delima of space and distance that is no longer felt as much anymore. The opening presents the line "[I was always a phone call away]". I like it in my anime library because it is short. When I have a craving to watch a film I can get in Voices, Ghost in the Shell, Spirited Away and Grave of Fireflies in. A good chunk of anime instead of 8 episodes in a tv series. It's a nice artpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: Yo
Review: If you're deciding wether to buy this movie or not. DO NOT!!!! OH MY GOD!!!! This is pathetic and sad. Its a copy of Gunbuster, minus character development, background storylines, in exchange for good animation and a story thats echo'd, well I should say stolen from Anime, all across the spectrum. I personally would have enjoyed a revamp'd version of Gunbuster had it been longer than 30 FREAKING MINUTES. It wsant even worth the 4$ I paid to rent it. Scenes that were similar to Gunbuster.
The Starship Laser Firing sequence
The Lone mecha against the single enemy capital ship.
The Shields of the "Tracer" and the mech from Gunbuster.
The design shape of the aliens.
The scene of some sort of reactor looks exactly like the Gunbuster Warp generator
The way the ships warped
The way the mecha launched
The organic appearance of the aliens
The shape of the capital ships
Rating:
Summary: A great story told in less than 30 minutes!!
Review: I happened to come across a review of this short film in many of the Anime Magizines I read. My first thought was that it couldn't be that good, it's only 30 minutes, however, since the review priased it very highly, I decided to fork out 10 bucks to buy it. This short story is like no other anime I have seen yet, it takes what could be a 10 - 20 episode series and compresses it into a 30 minute short film. Though all the character development is absent, this Voices of a Distant Star is a great concept. Someone had mentioned that Makoto Shinkai, was great in the way he tells short sories, now I can see first hand just how good he truly is!! I would love to see more of his works, it would also be interesting to see what this new comer to the world of anime can do with a full 10 - 20 episode series. I highly recomend this DVD to any anime fan, it is under 15 bucks, how can you go wrong!!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant in the time alloted.....
Review: WOW!! Who would have ever thought that you could have a movie so replete with genuine emotion in the time span of 25 minutes. This is worth buying, and I don't use the "buy" recommendation lightly. Some of the previous reviewers were dead on. One of the prior reviewers talked about how shortly after viewing this movie, that he immediately went on a vigorous search for the music that accompanies the menu screens. I immediately was laughing because thats exactly what i wound up doing... I used to think that an hour and a half was the minimum in order to create some sort of bond with characters, but this DVD proved that theory archaic. I predominantly prefer any sub to dubs when it comes to anime, but the dub version on this was actually better!! This is a rare case!! The voice actor on the English dub were very heart-felt, i just dont like the way the girl cries. Anyway, buy this, or at least rent it.
Rating:
Summary: poignant + great extras
Review: this 25 minute animation ranks pretty high on my list, and it easily out-strips movies 20 times this length. the premise is simple, two lovers are seperated by the span of light years and the only means of communication is via text messaging; however, the implications of the myriad of emotions the two must endure: feelings of loss, hope, despair, love... is captured in a beautifully backdropped package rather compactly. the viewer can see the logical progression without feeling as if the production were rushed or dumbed down. as some other reviewers have been so clamorous to point out, the running time IS only 25 minutes. i bought it thinking it would be a feature length movie but the fact that it is so short leaves THAT much more to the imagination. the impact is powerful, and while sometimes i do wish it were longer, its open-endedness has left me many sleepness nights of dreaming up my own endings. i recommend viewing this feature in the original japanese language with subtitles (i don't understand japanese either) because the english voiceovers seem a bit unenthusiastic. a lot more meaning comes out from the original inflections. plus, the extras bundled along with the main feature are great as well. watch She and Her Cat on the 3 minute version, it is not so short that you feel bereft of meaning and not so long that it becomes garbled. if you dig poetry, the lines speak like poetry. the interview with the creator was fun too, he's passionate about his work and its inspiring that he created all this from his home computer. perhaps one of the best things about this DVD is its replay value. with every viewing, i notice more details and catch a bit more of the underlying subtleties. it is fun popping it in when you're bored or want a quick animation fix and it's something i wouldn't mind taking a couple minutes to show a friend and then having a discussion about afterwards, because these kinds of clips BREED discussion. if you're looking for mindless action sequences, slapstick comedy, or half-naked fembots then this probably isn't for you. but if you're looking for something more thoughtful, a break from "everything else"... then i recommend it 100%. hope this helps, goodnight.
Rating:
Summary: Tastes Good But Not Filling
Review: * The anime DVD VOICES OF A DIFFERENT STAR consists, essentially, of
two short pieces, a half-hour item titled, unsuprisingly, 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 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.
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