However, when you watch this film, you can see the filmmaking style that Shinkai used when he produced The Place Promised in Our Early Days. The animation is lush, and the music is beautiful, but it feels like Shinkai ended the story too soon. As a viewer, I really wanted to know what happens to both Mikako and Noboru. However, the production only runs for 25 minutes, and it feels like the story isn't finished. Voices of a Distant Star uses the theory of relativity to tell an interesting story. Mikako's final message takes eight years to reach Noboru. As the Lysithea travels deeper into space, the time it takes a message to reach Noboru on Earth takes longer and longer. They communicate with one another across interplanetary, and eventually, interstellar space through the e-mail capabilities on their cell phones. When the Lysithea leaves Earth to search for the Tarsians, Mikako must leave her boyfriend, Noboru Terao, behind. She is part of a fighting squadron attached to the spacecraft carrier Lysithea.

Mikako is a Special Agent, and she pilots a giant bipedal robot. The story follows a middle-school girl named Mikako Nagamine, who is drafted into the UN Space Army for the war going on against a group of aliens called the Tarsians. ADV Films acquired the distribution rights for the United States, and released Voices of a Distant Star in 2003. The production was originally released in Japan on February 2, 2002. Voices of a Distant Star is an anime Original Video Animation (OVA) directed and produced by Makoto Shinkai on his Macintosh computer.

The voices of a distant star