ANI-MOVIES, *The Place Promised In Our Early Days

Makoto Shinkai's first full-length anime movie came out in 2004 titled The Place Promised In Our Early Days, and similar to his future works such as Your Name and Weathering With You this anime has star-crossed lovers separated by cosmic forces. This was also the first time Shinkai had worked with a full staff as opposed to when he started out doing his animated-short movies and OVAs all on his own, so when he hooked up with Comix Wave Inc. it was a match made in heaven as their combined efforts left its mark for years to come. This movie was able to bridge a great divide that still exists between anime fans and non-fans that anime is a media and not a genre, meaning its appeal isn't limited to simply a certain demographic, and this became much clearer as Shinkai's career went on as his productions went on to enrapture audiences, mostly due to the creator's work becoming more accessible to newcomers and when his films were given longer running tile, not that this hampered 5 Centimeters Per Second which was just under an hour long and got a live-action adaptation. The story itself is an alternate history yarn, and like most tales of that genre it involves WWII, but this is combined with a coming-of-age romance with heavy sci-fi overtones. It's almost like you're watching Evangelion minus the giant robots and monsters. In fact, most of the expository scenes that try to fill in the technobabble your used to hearing from Star Trek looks like all the high-tech facilities look like they take place in Tokyo-3, even the computer displays and control room layouts. Taking this parallel universe premise and fitting in a believable love story wasn't easy, but Shinkai managed to do it.

This is set in modern day in a world where Japan was split into two sections post-WWII, the north occupied by Russia, and the south occupied by America, also the Cold War is still active in this timeline. Two schoolfriends in the south, Hiroki and Takuya, are rebuilding an old aircraft they found and plan to make it flyable again so they can go to an enormous tower in the north region. Hiroki has a crush on his schoolmate Sayuri and invites her to see their progress. The boys promise to take Sayuri with her on their future endeavor, but then she goes missing and three years pass with Hiroki and Takuya abandoning their planned flight. After a time skip, Takuya is now a physicist working on a method of utilizing energy from parallel realities and finds out that Sayuri has been in a coma during all this time and her dreams are affecting the interaction between their universe and others. Hiroki has been living on his own but gets dreams from Sayuri who finally breaks through and informs him that her subconscious is trapped in a world where she's the only one in it, so Hiroki teams up with Takuya to free Sayuri from her mental exile. The two old schoolfriends meet up again to finish repairs on their plane and fly the comatose Sayuri to the tower which is acting as the nexus for all the multiverse mix-ups run by the northern faction. Since it's only a two-seater, Hiroki pilots the plane with Takuya stays behind all while both halves of Japan on the brink of war. Not to give away the ending, but it has a more satisfying conclusion than Shinkai's Five Centimeters Per Second.

The Place Promised In Our Early Days was first released in America through ADV Films but was later available on certain streaming servers and only subtitled. GKids eventually re-released it on home video format and streaming with the American dub. This was Makoto Shinkai's big theatrical debut, and it won lots of film festival awards, although in comparison to most of his other works this movie is slightly jumbled when Shinkai tried to combine a slice-of-life story with the overlapping interdimensional tropes. Shinkai managed to untangle this knot by the time he started his Disaster Trilogy as most of the otherworldly elementals are explained as simply being magic. Aside from the plot complications, this anime is glittering with Shinkai's particular style with lush horizons and backgrounds that make Ghibli look pale in comparison, plus the character designs are simple and reminiscent of 90s TV anime which at times works against the detailed landscapes. The film altogether is great but compared to Shinkai's future works it is not as memorable.