Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho (雲のむこう、約束の場所 The Place Promised In Our Early Days) is a brilliant masterpiece. If I had to recommend an animated movie to watch, it had to be this. The story was solid, the art was breathe-taking, the animation was fluid, and the music was flawless. The plot really covered a lot of ground; I can’t decide whether to view it as a love story with a happy ending, a philosophical approach to conflict, or a sci-fi epic in the telling (there are probably others but my mind is really not thinking because it’s so late).

Here’s an excerpt (actually the whole description) written by Rupert Bottenberg taken from the Fantasia 2005 website.

In an alternate history of the aftermath of World War II, Japan has been cleaved in half, with the south—Honshu and the other islands—allied with the United States and the northern island Hokkaido annexed by the enigmatic Union. It was on Hokkaido that a mysterious tower had been built, a strand of metal reaching up out of the atmosphere, visible from the northern tip of Honshu. In 1996, three teenagers, Hiroki, Takuya and Sayuri, make a pact—they will build an experimental aircraft, almost invisible to surveillance, cross over to Hokkaido and unlock the secrets of the tower. Their dream was never realized, because Sayuri was sent to Tokyo for treatment after she fell into a coma. It is now three years later. The rosy illusions of youth have fallen away, but not the unbreakable strength of the trio’s promise. The truth of the tower will be uncovered, and with it, the link between it and Sayuri’s mysterious, carefully tended condition.

Those fortunate anime fans who saw the utterly stunning short film Voices of a Distant Star at Fantasia 2003 will no doubt recall the tingle of discovery—an important new talent in Japanese animation had made his debut. Makoto Shinkai had created that magnificent short almost entirely alone, and earned major accolades for it, including the honour of Most valuable Newcomer at 2002’s Tokyo Anime Fair. He also earned the support of a complete animation team for his breathtaking follow-up, the feature-length The Place Promised in Our Early Days. This lush, patient science-fiction tale of love, trust, secrecy and the deep human thirst for truth and knowledge, executed with exquisite precision and taste, had its theatrical run in Tokyo extended not once but twice, and furthermore earned the prestigious title of Best Animated Film at the 59th Mainichi Film Awards, beating out no less than Otomo’s Steamboy and the latest from Hayao Miyazake!

I’ll post a review or so on this later, but for now just screenshots to illustrate my point about how great the art was. Viewing it in HDTV, 1024 x 576, really brings out the perfection and splendor of the art. Note that the following images at full size are recompressed JPEG files from the originals, roughly a 500 kb PNG file to a 50 kb JPEG file without resizing, so any dithering, pixeling, or glitches you might find in them are strictly due to the recompression.