The Place Promised In Our Early Days

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Anime movie
title The Place Promised In Our Early Days
Original title 雲 の む こ う 、 約束 の 場所
transcription Kumo no Muko, Yakusoku no Basho
Country of production JapanJapan Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 2004
Studio CoMix Wave Films
length 91 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Makoto Shinkai
script Makoto Shinkai
music Tenmon
synchronization

The Place Promised In Our Early Days (German: “The place promised in our early days”; Original title: Japanese. 雲 の む こ う 、 約束 の 場所 , Kumo no Mukō, Yakusoku no Basho , German: “Beyond the clouds, the promised Location ") is a 90-minute anime film directed by Makoto Shinkai . The film can be assigned to the genres of drama , science fiction and romance .

A novel by Shinta Kanō and a manga are based on the film .

content

Place of action

The action of The Place Promised In Our Early Days takes place in Japan in the late 1990s, more precisely in a kind of parallel world. Japan was divided in 1974 : the southern part, including the main islands of Honshū and Kyūshū , was occupied by the United States , while the northern island of Hokkaidō (or Ezo, as it is called in the film) was occupied by a union . In the same year the Union in question started the construction of a strange tower in Hokkaido, which had been designed by a scientist named Ekusun Tsukinoe . In clear weather, this tower should be visible from immeasurable height to Tokyo .

When the action started around 1990, the occupation of southern Japan by the United States ended and the two nations formed a pact called an alliance . Hokkaido remains under the care of the Union , there is heavy traffic between the northern and southern halves of Japan and border battles are the order of the day.

An underground organization has decided to reunite Japan. It is stable as the Uilta Liberation Front in the south of the country. Secretly supported by the Alliance , this organization carries out maneuvers and attacks in Union territory .

The early years

The film tells the story of three friends from Aomori in the northern end of the southern half of Japan: two boys, Hiroki Fujisawa and Takuya Shirakawa , both highly talented young people, and a girl, Sayuri Sawatari . In 1996 they are in eighth grade together, their final year of middle school. They are fascinated by the Hokkaido Tower, which can be seen across the Tsugaru Strait to the north.

On the last day before the spring break, one of Sayuri's friends, Kana Matsuura , confesses her feelings for him during a conversation with Takuya. But Takuya does not reply, but tries to convince Hiroki to meet with Kana in his place. Hiroki refuses, because he himself seems to be in love with Sayuri.

After class, Hiroki stays at school and practices archery , while Sayuri stays longer to practice violin . Together they take the train home and probably get to know each other better for the first time. Sayuri has been good friends with the two boys ever since.

The two boys in the gang found a crashed Japanese Marine Self-Defense Forces plane ; they affectionately call it Bella Ciela (probably based on beautiful sky ). They work together on a summer job at the Emishi Manufacturing arms factory. The works manager of this factory, Mr. Okabe , supports you in the repair of the aircraft with components and other material.

The three teenagers promise to fly to Hokkaido one day and see the tower. Before that can happen, however, Sayuri mysteriously disappears.

Three years later

Three years later, Takuya and Hiroki stopped working on Bella Ciela , and after the pain of Sayuri's disappearance, they took different paths.

Although he still attends high school, the talented Takuya is working as a physicist at the side of Ms. Maki Kasahara and under the care of Professor Tomizawa in a laboratory of the Alliance , which by the National Security Agency is supported by the United States and which with the Research in the field of parallel universes is engaged.

The laboratory already knows that the tower in Hokkaido, which went into operation in 1996, can replace matter around it with matter from other universes. However, it is not yet known exactly why this is only possible within a radius of two kilometers around the tower. Takuya becomes involved in the activities of the Uilta Liberation Front when he learns that Mr. Okabe is the head of that organization; the arms factory workers are additional agents. Okabe's interest in the organization originally arose when his family was trapped in Hokkaido due to the separation of the country. He wins Takuya with the Uilta for a trip to Ezo.

It becomes clear that Sayuri has spent the past three years in a hospital with an extreme form of narcolepsy (sleeping sickness). Apparently she slept for most of the three years. Her soul is trapped in a parallel world devoid of people, Sayuri is permanently lonely. Tomizawa has found that Sayuri is connected in an unknown way to the Union's research into such parallel worlds and into the capabilities of the tower in Hokkaido. She keeps this knowledge and Sayuri's current whereabouts secret from Takuya for the time being. Tomizawa is also an undercover agent for the Uilta and keeps Mr. Okabe informed about Sayuri, while Okabe reveals that the Uilta is planning to bomb the tower in order to provoke a war against the Union that will lead to the reunification of Japan.

Meanwhile, Hiroki has moved to Tokyo and high school is waiting for him too. During his sleep, dreams of Sayuri often haunt him; he suffers from clinical depression , which puts him in a miserable and lonely situation. One day he happens to receive a letter from Sayuri, which she must have written before she fell into an even deeper coma. He read it in March 2000, after which he went in search of her. Although the souls of Hiroki and Sayuri are in different universes, it is possible to establish contact with one another at times. Hiroki realizes that there is only one way to bring Sayuri back to life: he has to fly her body over to the tower, take her to the "place of our promise". Sayuri's body, however, was transferred to the security wing of a hospital at Aomori Army College .

Climax

Tensions between the Alliance and the Union continue to grow and it is becoming apparent that the Union is trying to use the tower as a weapon to replace the real world with a parallel universe. The situation becomes even more complicated when it becomes clear that Ekusun Tsukinoe , the designer of the mysterious tower, is Sayuri's grandfather, and that the only way to disable the tower is to keep Sayuri's coma: the further she is conscious regained, the greater the effective radius of the tower.

For Hiroki and Takuya, the crucial question arises: save the world or Sayuri?

Hiroki convinces Takuya that Sayuri is definitely worth risking the world.

Takuya kidnaps the body of Sayuri, who is still in a coma, from the military hospital. Together with Hiroki, they finish the repair work on the Bella Ciela a few hours before the United States declares war on the Union . The plane only has two seats, so Takuya leaves it to Hiroki to fly and keep the promise. He manages to steer the plane across the strait towards the tower, along with Sayuri's body and a missile from the Uilta . When Sayuri finally wakes up while the Bella Ciela orbits the tower, its activity increases dramatically and immediately begins to replace the matter in the area. The affected radius soon includes large parts of Hokkaido. In the last few minutes of her coma, Sayuri realizes that she will lose all of her childhood memories and dreams. The moment she wakes up, she cries, not yet realizing that the memory of her love for Hiroki has also passed.

On the return flight, Hiroki finally fires the projectile and destroys the tower, whereby the matter transformation stops immediately.

The film ends when Hiroki Sayuri vows to start all over again.

Conception

On the one hand, the world of film thematizes the Cold War, so the Union can be viewed as the Soviet Union , and the divisions associated with it, and on the other, dreams and parallel worlds.

Separation and reunification are experienced and passed through by all of Japan as well as by Mr. Okabe and Sayuri personally. Hiroki and Takuya also split up when Sayuri disappears. It takes three years and a mutual desire to find Sayuri again in order to get back together, and even then it remains a difficult reunion in which the two boys even fight at first.

Dreams like parallel worlds are thematized, for example, by the book that Sayuri reads at the beginning. It is called The Net Involved in a Dream . Dreams of humans and animals are described as visions of parallel worlds, parallel worlds (different realities that can be exchanged e.g. through the tower) are accordingly the dreams of the universe.

While the theme of parallel worlds and realities is not unpopular in the anime genre, its use in The Place Promised In Our Early Days is uncommon. Most other anime series do not explain why a reality or world should be different from ours. Here, however, the reality the viewer lives in is just one of the many possible, the reality in The Place Promised In Our Early Days is simply another.

There are also references to literature and modern technologies. Sayuri recites a poem in class: Eiketsu no asa ( Japanese永訣 の 朝, Morning of Forever Farewell ) from the Haru to Shura collection ( Japanese春 と 修羅) by Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933). It was written on the occasion of the premature death of his sister Toshi Miyazawa (1898–1922). The main characters use the fictional operating system Velaciela , which is similar to real UNIX systems. In the course of the film, the ls command, a computer console and a GPS device are presented in a realistic manner.

Film publications

The film was released on DVD in Japan in November 2004 and later broadcast on Animax . In North America, ADV Films is the publisher and license holder of the English version. In Germany, it will be released by Rapid Eye Movies in 2007 on DVD and in 2010 on Blu-ray . XL Media is releasing the film in Russia .

The film was released in a normal version and then in a collector's edition comprising two DVDs.

music

The end credits of the film, "Your voice" ( Japaneseき み の こ え, Kimi no koe ), were written by Makoto Shinkai and sung by Ai Kawashima . The background music comes from Tenmon .

synchronization

role Japanese speaker ( seiyū ) German speaker
Hiroki Fujisawa Hidetaka Yoshioka Tim Knauer
Takuya Shirakawa Masato Hagiwara Tobias Schmidt
Sayuri Sawatari Yuuka Nanri Mia Diekow
Prof. Tsuneo Tomizawa Kazuhiko Inoue Mario Grete
Okabe Unshou Ishizuka Eberhard Haar
Maki Kasahara Risa Mizuno Milena Karas

Manga

The Place Promised in Our Early Days is currently being published as a manga in Afternoon magazine. The series began in February 2006. Makoto Shinkai wrote the plot, while Mizu Sahara did the drawings .

criticism

“Makoto Shinkai tells a story of love and growing up in the guise of a science fiction film. He remains consistently committed to an extremely calm narrative style. With unusual perspectives, he breaks through common viewing habits and creates poetic, great picture tableaus. Almost without exception, his film is pervaded by the feeling of loneliness that searches for something without actually being able to name it. Although his plot finally takes up the motif of the parallel worlds within the film and puts Sayuri's fate in connection with the war. But this epic twist remains pale behind the personal story of Hiroki, Sayuri and Takuya. "

- Top video news

Awards

The film was honored with a special award at the 2005 Seoul Comics and Animation Festival and won second prize in the audience category Best Animated Film at the Canada Fantasia Film Festival . It also won the Best Animated Film Award at the 2004 Mainichi Film Awards , and the first trailer won the Best Expressive Technique Award at the 2003 Tokyo International Anime Fair .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ THE PLACE PROMISED IN OUR EARLY DAYS . Top video news. Publisher: Children's and Youth Film Center on behalf of the BMFSFJ .