Audience reviews
20 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
1stDecame4Danime
Another Shinkai movie repeating the same nonromance of nonlover noncharacters separated and trying to connect (across worlds, get it? just like how the multiverse tower connects the universes pointlessly, it's pointless, this whole movie is pointless). This ain't Your Name (I'm convinced his original script for Your Name was to just end it with the impact reveal of the comet and they never interact ever again before something led to the movie being rewritten with an actual plot by writing the rest and cutting out the filler to get it down to length). This is some scrawled out rough draft rehash with all his usual low effort proclivities (hello again girl foot fetish indulgence shot).
This movie is almost pure filler. It's rough to get through even sped way up. Both the nonromance and the n…
Read at the sourceAnimeBW
Well, I think it’s official; I am not a fan of Makoto Shinkai’s pre-Your Name career. Perhaps it’s by virtue of A Place Promised in Our Early Days being easily the weakest thing he’s ever put out, but watching this film, I couldn’t help but be exhausted by his entire sensibility. He’s spent just over a decade telling and re-telling the same basic story, and no matter how many variations he puts on it or how well he addresses his deficiencies, the basic mechanism by which he tells these stories is fundamentally flawed. His stories drag on and on through countless slow, plodding landscape shots, yet the actual plot is paradoxically rushed and underwritten. The atmosphere does its best to communicate the emotions of yearning, loss and isolation, but the actual characters are wooden ciphers wh…
Read at the sourceMadness17
I have very mixed feelings about Shinkai Makoto's work. On one hand, he really impressed me with Garden of Words, but on the other hand he really disappointed me with 5 centimeters per second, so i didn't know what to expect from this movie. So after sitting throught the longest 1 hour and a half of my life, i concluded that this movie is even WORSE than 5 centimeters per second. Before you start posting mean stuff on my accound, just try and read my review. It should be less painful than watching the actual movie.
Story: 2/10
I can't even begin to explain how bad the story was handled. Let's start with the pacing. Saying it was really slow is a huge understatement. This movie was incredibly boring. The thing that bugged me the most about the pacing is how every single scene starts and en…
Read at the sourceShanayaaa
**Feedback is appreciated as always**
**This review will have a different layout to my other reviews**
Story : 8
Art : 10
Sound : 8
Character : 6
Enjoyment : 9
Overall : 9 Story : 8
The story was unique, and had the same atmosphere at the other 'CoMix Wave' movies I've seen. I was really looking forward to watching this, especially after watching CoMix Wave's 'Garden of Words' and '5 Centimeters per Second', and I'm glad I did.
The beginning made me curious, and as the story went on, parts of the past were brought up, and it made me feel like it was thought through thoroughly. The ending was tear-jerking.
There isn't really much to pick fault in for this movie.
Art : 10
As expected of the producer(s), yet another gorgeously animated movie! Art as detailed as that is so satisfying to wa…
Read at the sourceCludensyo
When a guy like Makoto Shinkai (a person who has a distinctive style in his works) comes into your life, you'd promptly watch his other movies, even commercials, to see more of him (of course, assuming you like his movies).
So you watch the second one...
And then the third one...
And by the time you watch the fourth one, you would have known all of his troupes already. And in knowing these troupes mean that when you see his next work, you're bringing something that was not there before when you've watched that first movie: Expectations (or for some, higher expectations). Would it meet or surpass the other movies is a question that is on your head throughout watching the movie. And so far, Makoto Shinkai gave nothing short of the unique experience you can have in his films, always meetin…
Read at the sourceMarow
Originally published on Anime Viking: http://animeviking.wordpress.com/
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What marks Shinkai’s first full-length movie also remains as his best work to this date. Unlike Voices of a Distant Star’s rather simplistic production, The Place Promised in Our Early Days instead features gorgeous visuals, a breathtaking soundtrack and a much stronger directing overall. Personally, this is the movie by Makoto Shinkai.
What makes The Place Promised in Our Early Days such a success is how it is built up; divided into four distinct parts, yet flowing into each other naturally. This way of telling the story strengthens it, since we see the main characters interact with each other and grow up; making us feel the strong bond they all share.
But much to my disappointment none of the three chara…
Read at the sourceNonOtaku
Living alone, the nights seemed to last forever. When I couldn't pass the time effectively, I went to a nearby train station and pretended to wait for someone.
One summer’s day, three middle school students, Fujisawa Hiroki, Shirakawa Takuya, and Sawatari Sayuri made a promise to one day fly across the Tsugaru Strait and investigate the mysterious tower built in Hokkaido by the Union. Since that day, Sayuri has disappeared and as a result Hiroki and Takuya gave up on building an airplane to fulfill the promise. Years later, when Hiroki learns that Sayuri is in a coma, he tries to convince Takuya to resume work on the airplane. Even if Hiroki can persuade Takuya, a looming war threatens to destroy any hope of ever reaching the mysterious tower.
The first thing to emphasize is that, regar…
Read at the sourcexbobx
~Beyond the Clouds, The Promised Place~
-"A complicated love story told in a complex way."
This week I've been rewatching everything from Makoto Shinkai, and I still get impressed with the visuals of his movies and most of all with the complexity of the stories.
I better stop now... otherwise I'm probably leading to depression or a mental breakdown D:
Who's already familiar with Shinkai movies can doubtless tell this movie is about a love story.
However, the atmosphere created for this one is so impressive that can easily drive you away from the romantic side of the movie. That is why a lot of people and reviews tag it as "sci-fi", "WWII" or "mistery" because it has all these aspects mixed together, and each of them have its value in the plot.
In a alternative setting, just like 'Voice…
Read at the sourceFangz
This film gets 5/10, because it's almost exactly one half of a perfect film.
Let's start with the good parts and get them over and done with. The artistry is outstanding. Sound design is great. Character animation is only average, but that's plainly not the creator's focus so that doesn't matter. You can write pages and pages on how painterly Shinkai's work is, how any single frame of the film can be picked out and put on the wall as a work of genuine art.
But.
A film needs more than that to be an actual film. It needs a story, and believable characters, and this is where the film really falls down. The primary motivations, and actions of the characters may be convenient for framing the scenes Shinkai shows us, but on closer examination, simply fails to make sense.
Let's pick out one c…
Read at the sourceGoodEnoughForMe
The Place Promised in our Early Days remains, after my 8th viewing today, a crowning achievement, to me, not just in anime, but in cinema, or even art, as a whole. For 90 minutes, Shinkai sucks us in to a world where emotions and characters matter, as they grapple with each other and show the ways in which they all can affect us.
The movie is Shinkai's first full length feature, after the success of his promising, but ultimately a bit cheesy, 30 minute short debut titled Voices of a Distant Star. Like Voices, The Place Promised in our Early Days (henceforth I will shorten as The Place Promised) explores the way that time and distance impact our relationships, but with the full length, Shinkai is able to weave a much more complex, fulfilling, and beautiful tale. His maturation as a directo…
Read at the sourcekiriska
For all its post-WWII and science fiction elements, The Place Promised in Our Early Days is basically another story about lasting friendship and keeping promises, and I must admit that I'm a little tired of them.
Hiroki Fujisawa and Takuya Shirakawa are a pair of very capable ninth graders. They spend their time after school working a part-time job in order to buy parts for this airplane they're building. They hope to fly it across the Tsugaru Strait to Hokkaido, where a mysterious tower stands, dominating the sky. The tower is an enigma. It is a part of their landscape, their world, and they see it every day, but its purpose completely unknown. The boys eventually let a girl named Sayuri Sawatari in on their plans, and in the summer, they promise each other that they'll fly to the tower…
Read at the sourceSeabury
An amazingly good yet deeply flawed movie, is more or less how I would describe it. This blows Makoto Shinkai's previous work, Voices From a Distant Star, out of the water, though it lacks the levels of baseless emotional melodrama that made Voices so popular. So, briefly, this is the opposite of Voices. Voices was about two lovers drifting apart, and Place is about three friends coming back together. It includes a romance between two of the friends. What gives this show emo credentials is that they surmount all sorts of odds to reunite and fulfill a childhood promise. Power of friendship, rah rah, someone out there cried at the end, I know it! However, Makoto is so invested in his world of hyper emotion that the movie loses all reference to our reality. If you said out loud among company…
Read at the sourcechrysalis
If Jim Jarmusch directed anime, this is the type of movie he'd make. To it's benefit it cuts to the heart of the characters much like a Jarmusch film with slow, long deliberate takes, with a good deal of silence and sadness. I think one of my favorite scenes was when Takuya and Sayuri are riding the train together for the first time and the just sort of stand there, with each other in one of the best and most realistic depictions of thirteen year-old's I've ever seen on screen. The animations is beautiful, and even the framing, catching them off center, and from a distance, adds to a slight melancholy that is palpable throughout most of the film.
It has a few really great scenes like that which float around, almost dreamlike in the first half of the film. It's slow, and a bit novelistic,…
Read at the sourceTakarian
I finished watching The Place Promised in Our Early Days and simply had to write something about how I perceive and feel about the movie.
I think a lot of different animes stimulate a lot of different feelings. Some are funny, some are sad, some are mysterious and confusing, but The Place Promised in Our Early Days made me feel a lot of different emotions all at once. I felt joy, sadness and relief in a way I’ve never experienced before. The movie is one of Shinkai Makoto three dominant works Voices of a Distant Star, 5 Centimeters Per Second and of cause The Place Promised… And while all of the three movies contain seemingly identical themes, they individually interpret friendship and the universe differently. In The Place Promised the existence of alternate universes is interpreted and t…
Read at the sourcestormchasar
Unlike 5CM Per Second, this did not leave me feeling like I was going to cry out my entire soul. Also unlike 5CM Per Second, I didn't spend half the movie thinking, "this isn't that good." (See my review: http://myanimelist.net/anime/1689/5_Centimeters_per_Second/reviews) Rather, it's great, but not a deeply moving tearjerker like most of Shinkai's other work. Allow me to elaborate.
STORY:
While it's somewhat slow to develop and a little confusing at first, it's very innovative and quite touching in many parts. Very well executed, too. Unlike some animes, it's interesting enough on its own that you could write a book with it.
ART:
Probably the best thing about this entire anime. Shinkai could easily be a painter with this kind of art. It's strikingly beautiful through the whole thing. Th…
Read at the sourceTheLlama
The Place Promised starts out with a very tranquil slice of life setting, but don't get fooled by first appearances. It soon takes on a more dramatic tone, with a sense of sci.fi. over it too, depending on which of the two male leads' story it's currently following. With the dreams of the female lead poppign in here and there, you have three fantastic story which grabs you on a deep, emotional level, and it all ends with blending the three together in one splendid end scene, which I'll remember a long time.
The characters in The Place Promised are fantastic, deep and lifelike. Note the latter; they're lifelike. They're just normal kids going through all this, and that helps you to connect with them, you feel like you want them to achieve their dream from the bottom of your heart.
The art…
Read at the sourceslpless
I watched Makoto Shinkai’s first major work, Hoshi no Koe (Voices of a Distant Star) a year before watching this. Hoshi no Koe was nothing short of breathtaking. The animation, pacing, and plot were all top notch and even more surprising, it was essentially done by one person. After way too many delays, The Place of Promise in Our Early Days was finally released.
My initial impression was, ohh pretty. The animation was fantastic; everything was clean, crisp, and vivid. Although, sometimes a bit too clean, crisp, and vivid. This is especially true for the interior backgrounds. I think of a brand new shinny kitchen appliance with I see some of the interior backgrounds. However, the "nature" shots didn't give me that impression. Overall, the animation was very beautiful and well done.…
Read at the sourceCinnamonsylph
Of Makoto Shinkai's three best-known pieces, "The Place Promised in Our Early Days" possesses the most pronouncedly plot-oriented narrative: An ambiguous love triangle, a symbolic separation of worlds, and characteristic to Makoto, an open-ended and beautifully depressing conclusion.
Makoto is renowned for his narrative simplicity and stylistic detail: the viewer should expect a gently-delivered and largely "unexciting" story (until the final quarter of the film). Die-hard action-adventure fans are advised to keep their distance. What battles and mecha are absent from Makoto's work are wonderfully compensated with perfect art. Makoto's colors are something else: brave, original, unpretentious, and strongly conducive to speechlessness. More so than in "Voices of a distant star" and "5 cm…
Read at the sourceHiromi
It should be noted that first of all, I’m writing reviews for both The Place Promised in Our Early Days and 5 Centimeters per Second at the same time (and as such, I’ll be including the same opening paragraph). Both of these series, feature films, animes, whatever you want to call them hold a special place in my heart/head, again your call. Not because they’re overly interesting or because they’re extremely entertaining but because they make me sad. Strange, right? Well, I’m willing to bet that any anime lover will instantly favorite (no, not add to their favorite list or anything grand) any anime (or anything for that matter) that can hit a cord within him or herself. Anything that can resonate with our frequency or run parallel to our curves; anything that c…
Read at the sourceFaust721
Makoto Shinkai's first feature-lengthed work - The Place Promised in Our Early Days.
Story: Just like Voices in a Distant Star and 5 Centimeters Per Second, this is a story about 2 people and their distances. Unlike Voices where their distance is that of time and space, Place Promised is about their distance across dimensions/dreams/reality. What I like about this concept is how well Shinkai presented it. Sayuri (our heroine) is physically in the world, but spiritually trapped in another. It is very touching to see Hiroki (our hero) search for Sayuri knowing that she is very close yet at the same time very far away from him. While the whole together->separation->search part of the story exciting to watch, the sci-fi/war part felt a little boring. I can understand having that part in the s…
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