Review for The Shinkai Collection (Review)
Friday, 16th December 2011, 14:52

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Introduction
Makoto Shinkai is the hot new thing in Japanese animation, and has been for the last ten years. He's another one of the new wave of animators that is constantly being dubbed as the next Miyazaki. It's a little unfair, as his work to date has hardly been the fairy tale wonderments that Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli often astound with. Shinkai's work does share a visual splendour and beauty with Miyazaki's works, although what Shinkai does with light and shade, mood and atmosphere is much more complex. But Shinkai's subject matter, the testing of human feelings against adversity, is a far more adult and mature approach to storytelling that is unique to his works. He's also something of an oddity in the way that he broke into the animation business, creating his first work practically single-handedly on an Apple Mac at home, and capturing the attention of studios that way, rather than working his way up the studio system. He's a product of the modern age, where we all have access to powerful tools at relatively cheap prices, but not all of us have the talent. Back in the nineties people were making pop music in their bedrooms… now they make animated movies.

Makoto Shinkai is also one of the more inaccessible directors in modern anime, at least coming from a UK perspective. His first films, Voices of a Distant Star, and The Place Promised in Our Early Days were originally released here by ADV, but I wavered and waffled, and by the time I got around to filling that gap in my collection, ADV was out of business, and the DVDs were long deleted. His third movie, 5 Centimeters per Second was in licensing limbo for years, initially set for release by ADV before their collapse, Manga Entertainment tried in vain to get the Blu-ray rights before eventually setting out a DVD only release. It was after watching that film last year my desire to see the rest of his catalogue increased to the point that I began regularly scouring the Internet in the hope of finding the films somewhere. It was pure serendipity then that a specialist anime retailer uncovered a few unsold copies of The Shinkai Collection, ADV's collection of the first two discs, which also added a very desirable booklet to the package. You'll have to be just as persistent and lucky to find them now, and probably only second hand. Although with Makoto Shinkai's latest film, Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below wowing the festival circuits earlier this year, and his earlier works getting a Blu-ray re-visitation in Japan (English friendly in the case of 5 Centimeters Per Second and Voices of a Distant Star), it may be an opportune moment for an enterprising anime distributor to re-licence these works.

Voices of a Distant Star is reviewed on Page 2
The Place Promised in Our Early Days is reviewed on Page 3

Extras
The Shinkai Collection gets extravagant packaging for just two discs, an m-lock style Perspex brick, which for some daft reason still has both discs overlapped on the rear panel. The silver sleeve is pretty simple, but the interior art is very evocative, as are the disc labels.

The big draw here is the additional 44-page booklet containing introductions by Makoto Shinkai, production notes, glossaries, artwork, storyboards, and background to the films. 26 pages are devoted to Voices of a Distant Star, starting from the front of the book reading forward conventionally. The material for The Place Promised in Our Early Days starts at the back and works its way backwards towards the middle. There is a lot to take in here, densely written in a small font, and it's well worth devoting a good amount of time to reading it. It's all excellent stuff.

Conclusion
Anime as art! So often anime is looked down as a minority, niche product, and in terms of content it invites raised noses and sneering epithets. On occasion it can be deserved. Like any entertainment medium the content is dependent on the creator and the consumer. As long as children the world over enjoy collecting cards and vicariously engaging in animated tournaments, shows like Pokemon will forever be churned out. Lowbrow tastes will always be catered for by fan service, and there will always be something to irritate Middle England. It's just the same with live action cinema.

Where there is the monobloc of the majority, there is also the auteur, the individualist, the artist, the outsider looking in, the genius talent that picks up the same tools as the mass-production studio system, and instead creates pure art. Makoto Shinkai is such a creator. You can take one of his films, press pause at any point, and you can hang that freeze-frame on a wall. But as always, art is the most subjective of topics, and Shinkai's muses of regret, loneliness, separation and loss may not be to all tastes. But I'd much rather own a piece of art that I didn't comprehend, than a mass produced poster of a tennis player scratching her arse. If I don't understand an artwork today, I may be in the appropriate emotional frame of mind to appreciate it a week, a month, or even ten years from now.

What I'm saying is that if you find any of Shinkai's films available, new or second hand, snap them up without hesitation.

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