THE 8TH-GRADE FOREVER WAR

I don't usually like to blog about movies I've seen -- it just doesn't seem like a very useful thing for me to do -- but I need to tell you guys about this 30-minute anime feature I just saw called Voices of a Distant Star that was really good. All the more surprising because it was apparently made by just one dude, on a Mac G4 in his apartment or something. It's kind of amazing. The story is a quick epistolary crossbreed of The Forever War and Ender's Game filtered through anime: There are two characters who are about to go into high school -- a guy, who's on Earth, and a girl, who's been picked to be a mecha pilot in a UN armada launched to attack a faraway alien race who destroyed our Martian exploration group. She sends him missives via cellphone text messages, but because of the increasing distance, it takes progressively longer and longer for those messages to traverse the void. This could be really cheesy, and on some level it probably is, but this movie affected me to such a surprising degree that I don't really care. Neither should you. I was torn at the end between wanting more and being like "That was basically perfect." I don't know. Just watch it. You can get it from Netflix. I hear that's what everyone's doing these days.