Many movies from Japan replace action with atmosphere. The Place Promised In Our Early Days is one such movie. Almost everything in the movie — artwork, audio, music, screenplay — was done by Makoto Shinkai. His sensitive, gentle character fills the movie; pregnant pauses convey deep feeling nearly as often as the dialog.

This movie is not about any particular event so much as it is about exploring the beauty of the world and deep feelings of loneliness. If this sounds like your kind of thing, I strongly encourage you to rent it from netflix and watch it. The interviews with the director and Hiroki’s voice actor are especially good.

Be sure to watch the movie in Japanese. The English version seems to have a different feeling. Compare the trailers:

• Japanese Trailer
• English Trailer

This entry was posted on 2006-10-29 at 10:39 and is filed under Life in Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.