The Place Promised in Our Early Days is gifted with gorgeous animation effects. Hiroki and Takuya, too, will go their own ways – the former moving away and working for the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) after school, the latter staying around Aomori – as war looms between the United States and the USSR. Yet, Sayuri is having serious health problems unbeknownst to her friends, and will lose contact with both Hiroki and Takuya as the summer goes on.
The three children promise to each other to fly the craft to the Soviet tower someday, just as it becomes apparent that there are certain middle school-ish feelings that are being left unsaid between her and both boys (oh no!). After school and during the summer, Hiroki and Takuya work on a small, wrecked aircraft from the Maritime Self-Defense Force (Japan’s “Navy” – but they don’t use that term following WWII) which they have salvaged. In Aomori Prefecture lives a group of friends – two boys named Hiroki Fujisawa and Takuya Shirakawa and a girl named Sayuri Sawatari – nearing the end of their middle school days. Our film begins in 1996 with the Cold War ongoing. In an alternate timeline, the Soviet Union has occupied Japan’s major northern island of Hokkaido since 1974, subsequently building a colossal tower that extends high into the atmosphere (see the left side of provided picture). The Place Promised in Our Early Days is beautiful to look at, but its convoluted and unbelievable plot and inexplicable rashness from the characters detract from a diverting, but poorly-fitting jigsaw puzzle of a movie. So, we start at the beginning, with Shinkai’s first theatrical feature. But before we get there and before Your Name makes its American theatrical debut, I have to do my homework. Your Name is within a matter of weeks, if not days, away from surpassing Spirited Away (2001) for the highest worldwide grossing anime film of all time. Makoto Shinkai has been working as an animator since graduating from college in 1994, and his most recent film, Your Name (2016), is a critical and popular darling in Japan, shattering Asian and Oceanian box office records for anime film.
In the collective sadness that has hung over non-Japanese anime fans since the shuttering of Ghibli’s feature films operations, there have been recent developments in Japan surrounding the “new Miyazaki” – those are the words of Japanese media and domestic anime consumers’, not mine.
#The place promised in our early days 2004 series
Japan’s animation industry will continue to produce television series and feature films as they have been doing so for decades. The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004, Japan)Īnime feature films do not begin and end with Studio Ghibli, contrary to what some might believe.
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