Here be spoilers. When I leave I dont know what Im hoping to findWhen I leave I dont know what Im leaving behind The Analog Kid Rush 600https://ur.com/Ylqhc92.png How much do you care about the things you care about? How much effort would you put in to them to get them done or finished if you really really had to? How willing are you to go that extra mile or two or five? And what kind of selfbelief does it take to believe that people will like it when you finish? With those in mind its a damned miracle that any film gets released at all really. But directors wouldnt be directors if they didnt have a vision. In this short you can feel the vision of its director straining at the surface to break out. In places it nearly does. But in most of it its hidden by the failings in other areas. Whats clear though is that this short by Makoto Shinkai has the ideas and the pedigree to be great. But it never stretches beyond being just good. But maybe thats OK. Time is...such a cruel thief. Story 600https://ur.com/E7VKEue.png Shinkais standard fare of connections and the things that break them is fertile ground for storytelling. This variation on it is particularly clever because it occupies a world which is in 2020 retrofuturistic. Whilst the Japanese did use flip phones for a lot longer than we did in the West the main plot device of flip phones being the only anchor that holds a relationship that hasnt yet had the chance to even come into existence together is a clever one. Because its not really about the technology. What its about is the fact that sometimes there are barriers between us which stop us from saying what wed like. And thats a properly heartbreaking thing which Shinkai does his best to capture the absolute quintessence of and mostly succeeds. So the story such as it is doesnt matter so much. Its about high school lovers separated by space and eventually by time linked together by the tiny thread of their messages to the ether. Its a clever if maybe not technically scientific conceit and certainly one likely at least inspired by Gunbuster and as the two spiral further and further apart in both space and time Shinkai leverages his setting to provide a set of heartrending little moments. More on this in a second. As the movie ends a nice little insert song by Ai Miyoko starts playing and Shinkai unveils the very cleverest feat: a typical mecha action scene but devoid of the standard exciting cutting instead with big and sweeping camera movements and a voiceover on top from Sumi Mutoh that tones down the volume of the scene. Shinkai I think knows that he cant hope to match the production values of a bigbudget mecha series and therefore tries and succeeds at something quite different. A distance that takes eight years at the speed of light is no different than saying forever. Art Backgrounds and Direction 600https://ur.com/9pOOVcV.png The good: Makoto Shinkais strength has always been his art and backgrounds and hes a very clear eye for a very specific sort of background not just sky porn but specifically the sort of imagery designed to be reminiscent of something. Sometimes thats the sky since everyones seen it and imagined the sky. But Shinkais very best backgrounds are the ones that arent photoreal as he slides into magical realism. Almost every shot you will see from 5cm per second say looks too good to be true. Shinkais utilisation of animation to give a magical and nostalgic edge to highly realist tracings of real places is tops and his instinct for and interest in celestial lighting is impressively good. The bad: Makoto Shinkai is much worse at depicting high technology a failing that he repeated in The Place Promised... and which holds him up here badly. Minimal shots of the mechas and the artificial lighting minimise the issue but when theyre used theyre really not very good. The ugly: The character designs. Admittedly there are only two characters on screen at all but...they look awful they go off model a lot and action animation is bizarrely herkyjerky. Unfortunately...that means that theres a definite slideshowy feel to the movie understandable for the work of one man but still an issue. So...whats the result? Well Shinkai knows that hes not personally skilled enough to sell character animation convincingly. So it leads to a utilisation of the imagerybarrage style under a voiceover which has since become nearly a trademark. Shinkai is interested in images and hes very good at picking extremely evocative ones. ...together? Music and Sound 500https://ur.com/Bjls4Z8.png Tenmons piano score is elegiac and moving whilst the ED song is welldone if not as spectacular as the songs of Your Name or 5 Centimeters Per Second or even Children Who Chase Lost Voices. Sound design especially in the mecha scenes is genuinely quite good although the mixing can be suspect at times. Im guessing this is mostly intentional but for the most part its relatively unimportant. I wonder if...youll forget about me? Final Thoughts 600https://ur.com/HZv2rzv.png This is a really rough draft. And make no mistake there are lots and lots of rough edges in this short. But theres something undeniably magnetic about Makoto Shinkais directing art and ideas. If there werent then they wouldnt make up for the rough edges. And that I think is all that you can ask from a short like this one. Potential some polish and promise. Its less than half an hour. Why not give it a spin? 600https://ur.com/LpaegDK.png I am here. Pointy