Original text at the nekoheadz.org forum

My second review this week, (the first being Yonna in the Solitary Fortress), Hoshizora Kiseki is listed as an ONA on Anime Encyclopedia. For those not familiar with these things, ONA stands for Original Net Animation. Admittedly, I’m not very familiar with these releases other than the fact that they are originally released on the internet and distributed that way. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog is probably the best and most successful example of a net release. I think I can actually pull off a spoiler-free review for this one.

Hoshizora Kiseki (hereafter referred to as HK) is a story about a girl and her quest for summer romance. The main character, Kozue, is a high school girl with a fixation on astronomy. Hearing a voice telling her where a meteor will fall, she decides to go on a camping trip on the neighboring mountain so she can be there when it happens. Once there, she meets a boy in a spacesuit with some sort of stellar ability that will vanish once he’s left in the normal atmosphere. Kozue attempts to get the boy to choose for himself whether he will be a tool for the government or if he will leave his bubble.

HK strikes me as a work someone did after watching all of Makoto Shinkai’s works (Voices of a Distant Star, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, and 3cm Per Second). The backgrounds are all focused on the sky with wide, panoramic angles. The characters are internalized eccentrics with special mental ties to one another. The music aims for profound stirrings of the heart. Unfortunately, it’s not a Makoto Shinkai work and without his hand to tie it all together it turned into a flat imitation. That’s not to say it’s all bad, the animation is still really nice and pretty and the backgrounds are stunning (though not as artistically powerful as Makoto’s), and the characters are top notch. Kozue is an obsessive eccentric with loner tendencies, though she still has the same desires as normal high school girls. The boy in the bubble is dynamic and strange, making for an interesting pair romantically and thematically. I’m reminded of Nodame Cantabile, actually, only with the roles reversed where Chiaki was the obsessive eccentric and Nodame was dynamic and strange. I wonder if this is the beginning of a new set of stereotypes. The story is fairly straightforward and well-paced for twenty minutes; hardly any time goes to waste with things that aren’t related to the love story and the setting for the characters. The music is a little flat, but the rest of it is pretty solid.

I do have one major gripe with HK, though: it’s too damned misogynistic. All of the female characters have roles subservient to the males. The military girls operate the computers and handle communications while the men do all the big important things like roughing up high school girls and keeping boys trapped in bubbles. There are moments of straight-up objectification of the main character and one of her friends, and while I like fan-service (I did review the first episode of Queen’s Blade which I would avoid like the plague if I wasn’t into fan-service), I only like fan-service when it doesn’t distract from the story: a long shot of Kozue’s ass may be sexy, but it’s a terrible flow breaker when it’s shoe horned into the show. The big climax of the story sees Kozue on the sidelines while the males do all the decision making. It’s probably pretty obvious at this point, but I am not a fan of patriarchic societal trends as the only way to pursue equality is not through political correctness, but through vigilance against subtle and overt social programming.

Hoshizora Kiseki is fairly competent, though uninspired. Sexist trends aside, the story, music, and animation are all above average with the animation standing a cut above. However, the eerie similarities to Makoto Shinkai’s works bring this one down quite a bit on my “I liked it a lot and want you to watch it scale,” as HK is the generic store brand soda compared to Coke or Pepsi: flat and desperately trying to be something original and inspired by copying something original and inspired. For a piece to be moving it needs to have a journey from at least one emotion to the other. However, HK is still interesting and if it had been a bit longer it could have really made a name for itself. Since it’s not longer, I can only recommend it for Makoto fans or folks looking for some good characters and quick romance. Hey, it’ll fill a little bit of time before the next Makoto pictures comes out.

~Whim

PS – I watched this as a fansub from Ureshi.
PS2 – See, shorter.