The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004)

The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004)

Directed by: Makoto Shinkai

Starring: Hidetaka Yoshioka, Masato Hagiwara, Yuka Nanri

This was one of a list of anime that my girlfriend recommended to me almost a year ago, and I’m still sloooowly working through them. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have ever watched this, so I just wanted to make that note.

As kids, two boys start building an airplane as a summer project, and they both develop a crush on this girl who hangs out with them. One day she just disappears, and the boys split ways. A couple years later, in high school, one of the boys is now a scientist working on a way to look into an alternate universe to predict the future. Apparently the gateway is best made while using a dreaming person, so he gets a test subject who’s been in a coma for years; the girl he used to know. Once the other kid finds out, he decides that the only way to wake her up and save her is to fly her in that plane out to this huge tower, thus fulfilling the promise he made her when they were younger.

Pretty much the only problem with this movie is that it makes no goddamn sense at all. There’s all this stuff about parallel universes and there’s this huge tower and there are separatists, apparently, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, the three main characters associations with each other are nebulously explained at best… I dunno, maybe I just didn’t get it, but it seemed like a mostly disconnected series of events in a vaguely science fictioney sort of world.