Hacker Cinema
Voices of a Distant Star
ほしのこえ
2002 · Film · short · 25 min
Directed by Makoto Shinkai
AnimationScience FictionRomance
It is 2046 when a mysterious alien force begins their annihilation of the human race. Leaving behind the one person she loves, Mikako joins the interstellar battle as a pilot. And so - while Mikako risks her life to save mankind - Noboru waits. The two lovers, worlds apart, desperately strive to remain connected as the gap between them widens at a frightening pace.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
I'm a software engineer and hobbyist actor/director. My friends are in the film industry and are in IATSE and SAG-AFTRA. I've made photons-on-glass films for decades, and I frequently film stuff with my friends for festivals.
I love this AI video technology.
Here are some of the films my friends and I have been making with AI. These are not "prompted", but instead use a lot of hand animation, rotoscoping, and human voice acting in addition to AI assistance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x7IZkHiGD8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4
Here are films from other industry folks. One of them writes for a TV show you probably watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZC6XmEmK0
I see several incredibly good things happening with this tech:
- More people being able to visually articulate themselves, including "lay" people who typically do not use editing software.
- Creative talent at the bottom rungs being able to reach high with their ambition and pitch grand ideas. With enough effort, they don't even need studio capital anymore. (Think about the tens of thousands of students that go to film school that never get to direct their dream film. That was a lot of us!)
- Smaller studios can start to compete with big studios. A ten person studio in France can now make a well-crafted animation that has more heart and soul than recent by-the-formula Pixar films. It's going to start looking like indie games. Silksong and Undertale and Stardew Valley, but for movies, shows, and shorts. Makoto Shinkai did this once by himself with "Voices of a Distant Star", but it hasn't been oft repeated. Now that is becoming possible.
You can't just "prompt" this stuff. It takes work. (Each of the shorts above took days of effort - something you probably wouldn't know unless you're in the trenches trying to use the tech!)
For people that know how to do a little VFX and editing, and that know the basic rules of storytelling, these tools are remarkable assets that compliment an existing skill set. But every shot, every location, every scene is still work. And you have to weave that all into a compelling story with good hooks and visuals. It's multi-layered and complex. Not unlike code.
And another code analogy: think of these models like Claude Code for the creative. An exoskeleton, but not the core driving engineer or vision that draws it all together. You can't prompt a code base, and similarly, you can't prompt a movie. At least not anytime soon.
We're talking about orthogonal things again.
IP vs distribution vs the means of production.
I'm happy to discuss all of these things, but let's stop flip flopping around.
When the means of production are easier, that changes the supply and demand curves. There's more supply and lower cost, but that opens the gates to larger and new work that hasn't been possible before.
We're entering an era where ONE PERSON can make a Pixar film. That's astounding and amazing. Every artist can become a Makoto Shinkai [1] and make their own Voices of a Distant Star [2] in their garage. All by themselves.
We're going to see an explosion of creators like Makoto Shinkai, Vivienne Medrano, Joel Haver, Zach Hadel, et al.
Garage Band and Indie Music and Steam Greenlight and Indie Games is exactly what is about to happen to art, animation, and film.
Distribution will be hard, but the market for indie creators is exploding. And the work they produce is so much better than Hollywood slop. They put their heart and soul into their work, and you can tell. It's direct and intimate.
I am one of these creators, and I am telling you: this is a good thing !
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Shinkai
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_of_a_Distant_Star
I wholeheartedly disagree. Pixar does not have a monopoly on attention to detail. They're flush with cash and their leadership has decent taste.
There are so many creators putting in intense work, and doing it on low budgets. You can't claim these folks don't have attention to detail. Check out A24, low and mid and low budget films, or independent films and you'll see a wide assortment of highly meticulous storytellers.
Pixar, on the other hand, isn't low or mid budget:
Toy Story - $30 Million A Bug’s Life - $120 Million Toy Story 2 - $90 Million Monsters, Inc. - $115 Million Finding Nemo - $94 Million The Incredibles - $92 Million Cars - $120 Million Ratatouille - $150 Million WALL-E - $180 Million Up - $175 Million Toy Story 3 - $200 Million Cars 2 - $200 Million Brave - $185 Million Monsters University - $200 Million Inside Out - $175 Million The Good Dinosaur - $200 Million Finding Dory - $200 Million Cars 3 - $175 Million Coco - $175 Million Incredibles 2 - $200 Million Toy Story 4 - $200 Million Onward - $175 Million Soul - $150 Million Luca - Unknown but probably around $150 Million Turning Red - $175 Million Lightyear - $200 Million For that amount of money, they had better pay attention to detail.
Miyazaki is doing way more with much less.
Voices of a Distant Star was one person -- Shinkai. That's the kind of thing we'll see more and more of. Small creators reaching audiences and building studios. Gooseworx, psychicpebbles, Vivienne Medrano. That's the algorithm of tomorrow.
AI, as a tool, makes this more possible. One of the first people to do it successfully was Joel Haver, and he's just the first of many to come.
Nah.
I'd push things like Spirited Away or Tokyo Godfathers first, as far as anime-movies go actually.
EoE is good for the Evangelion fans. But honestly, Tokyo Godfathers hit me way harder.
EoE probably doesn't even hit my top 5 list of anime movies.
#1: Spirited Away
#2: Tokyo Godfathers
#3: Girl who Leapt through Time
#4: Summer Wars
#5: "Voices of a Distant Star" for #5? Hmm, or maybe "Time of Eve" ?? A lot of things I wanna fit in here but not EoE yet.
Not even getting to the "classics" like Akira, Eden of the East, Ghost in a Shell or whatever. These above movies have some mainstream appeal but still manage to hit that thoughtful analysis and depth. I'd still put something like Ghost in a Shell or "Your Name" above EoE...
There are also 'kid anime movies' like Patema Inverted that really were excellent and deserve recognition.
EoE is niche and fine for Evangelion fans though. Absolutely beautiful, and some of the best fight scenes I've ever seen. But you gotta see some of the __good anime movies__ out there. They all stand above EoE IMO.
> I've never really developed a taste for Japanese animation, and went in with no expectations.
To be fair, the vast majority of it is crap. (In much the same way the majority of American entertainment content is also crap)
But there's also fantastic stuff out there, like Miyazaki films.
Makoto Shinkai has some excellent films.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Shinkai
Garden of Words, 5 Centimeters Per Second, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, The Place Promised in our Early Days, and Voices of a Distant Star are all excellent.
Mamoru Hosoda's recent works have all been quite good as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamoru_Hosoda
I'm not really a fan of his earlier works, but everything he's done since The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has been very high caliber.
I wouldn't say either is quite at the level of Miyazaki and Ghibli, but they're both quite good, and some of the better examples of the medium at it's best.