Happy ending

Bertram 2022-10-10 22:05:16

Remember the feeling of waiting for a text message? A little bit of apprehension, a little bit of guesswork. Uneasy, looking forward. At the moment when the last button was pressed, it seemed that the sound of the radio waves spreading in the air was ringing in my ears, accompanied by a feeling of being hung up and sinking into the water, and countless words that didn't make sense. go away. Then something seemed to fall, and I couldn't see whether it was the water glass on the table or the fountain pen thrown there, and I fell into the darkness all of a sudden. Until someone lit a match in the quiet room, and with a sound of "cha-", the not-so-bright flame flickered and was blown out again.

During the waiting time, it seems that there is always something to do, but the time is still rapidly compressed under the measurement of short messages, and it seems that the whole person has nothing to do. From time to time, I take out my phone and turn on the screen, as if I always feel like I'm missing something. What a strange thing this is: in the few minutes of waiting, time seems to be stretched infinitely; however, some time passes by in a blink of an eye, so fast that you feel that someone in invisible time and space has cheated, There is no reason to set the clocks all over the world incredibly fast. Too many such ideas always feel unreliable, and in theory there seems to be a rather hopeless situation: If you had to wait eight years and seven months for a text message, what would you say?

"I like you"? Oh, it's really childish.

However, life is so short that we cannot count eight years for us to wait.

Suddenly, I felt that Makoto Shinkai's animation was nothing more than that. Childhood sweethearts are helplessly separated, and the vicissitudes of life always make people sigh. The power of human beings is unprecedentedly fragile and insignificant under the rotation of the great wheel of fate. From "The Voice of the Stars" to "Beyond the Clouds, The Promised Place", and then to "Five Centimeters Per Second", it seems to be like this. However, even so, I still can't stop falling into it every time, and learn to be firm and grow in those delicate and delicate pictures that are constantly intertwined and jumped.

The endless clear sky, the magnificent clouds, the tram, the platform, the convenience store, the snow scene is gentle and poetic, just like his plain but romantic lens language. Everything seems to constitute typical Shinkai-style animation elements. The constantly staggered and changing pictures lengthen the sense of time, and in line with the storyline of the protagonist’s time travel in the alternate world, it is no wonder that some people say that this animation, which is only 24 minutes long, seems like an hour has passed after watching it.

Lovers who are separated by a distance measured in light-years can only communicate with each other through radio waves and comfort each other through each other's response. In the memories, there are only broken images, just a few words, those pictures, sounds, tastes, and even a complete past. However, these scattered and even trivial details are finally eternal because of the power of missing. The radio waves spread slowly but persistently in the air for eight years. In this process, the missing has become nothing more than a long-lost heavy rain. It is just going to the convenience store to buy ice cream together. It is just a summer cloud, yes The icy rain is the sound of rain falling on umbrellas, the soft soil of spring, but the cool air after school, the smell of blackboard erasers, the sound of trucks driving by in the middle of the night, the smell of asphalt roads at dusk; It is hoped to be able to experience these kinds of things together. Just miss.

Is missing really able to travel through time and space? What is the tacit understanding between lovers? And when you think about the meaning of a wait, has such a wait become meaningless?

Or is the so-called Happy ending actually a lie?

View more about Voices of a Distant Star reviews

Extended Reading

Voices of a Distant Star quotes

  • Mikako Nagamine: That's right... I'm not in that world anymore.

  • Noboru Terao: It's stopped raining, hasn't it? Hey, look The sky It's a Tracer. It's pretty, isn't it?

    Mikako Nagamine: Yeah... Say, Noboru... You know, I... I am going to be onboard that.