Amateur Recommendation Hour: Children Who Chase Lost Voices

Today’s recommendation will evoke memories of your favorite Studio Ghibli films, not only because they were heavily inspirational to the team at CoMix Wave, wearing their admiration for the legendary titans of Japanese animation on their sleeve while still making something that stands on its individual own beyond its influences, but because it is impressively able to capture the feelings of wonder, mysticism, and a mixture of unknown past and future that define the most seminal fantastical works of animation and allow them to endure the test of time.

Children Who Chase Lost Voices, directed by Makoto Shinkai, is a work that combines elements of other formative works of animation as a starting point to create something both evocative and similarly special while also distinguishing it from it’s peers in notable ways that alter both it’s themes and it’s tone, synergized to allow a different style of voice and inflection to the work than those that came before. As the most intelligent works of art do, it is able to differentiate itself from the origins of its ideas to feel unique and ultimately individual. This is more than just "Ghibli lite." It's a love letter certainly, but a letter that is distinctly in Shinkai's own words to those that helped make his dream of directing animation features for the world over to see, a reality.

A young girl Asuna Watase has been put in an unenviable position. With her mother working long shifts as a nurse and her father passed away, she is forced to reckon with coming of age sooner than the average child. She spends much of her time listening to her crystal radio hearing distant music, her father gave to her as a memento. One day while walking across a bridge to get to her clubhouse she is ambushed by a hulking creature, the creature is driven away by a teenage boy, with whom afterwards she listens to her radio with and learns bits and pieces about him. His name is Shun and he hails from another country called Agartha. Eventually with said memento in tow she is whisked away into a fantastical world of mythical beasts and ultimately discovers herself to be in the middle of a multifaceted conflict.

Its narrative pacing is excellent, brilliantly giving enough time for its setting and characters to breathe and be realized in what their lives look like before they are thrust into their respective dramatic struggles between status quo and new state of being. You can feel the emotional temperature of Asuna’s daily life, warm and tame but with a lingering coolness that desires to be heated from so many unanswered questions. And its relative emptiness is a wound that is regularly painful. As it unfolds it finds equal time to dazzle with its visuals and spectacle with mellow and quiet moments of reflection. It’s oscillation between swashbuckling adventure and meditative contemplation doesn’t induce the kind of tonal whiplash one might expect because it is delivered with a gentle but firm hand.

Regular Makoto Shinkai collaborator and composer Tenmon delivers and emotionally moving and enthralling score that is both more in it’s instrumentation that adds both texture to the world and legitimate backing to character. While his heart-wrenching piano ballads are still present as in his past works, he incorporates more symphonic elements that give added weight and extravagance to more action-focused scenes, admittedly something he did not have to do in his previous works. Rising to the occasion and delivering a memorable soundscape deserving of the ambition of the film.

The coloring of the world of Children Who Chase Lost Voices gives it a spiritual and almost ethereal quality to its proceedings. From the magenta nights and greenery of the surface to the gold tinged skies of Agartha there is an emotional texture given with each setting that adds much to the experience. Contributing and communicating a feeling, a stillness eagerly wanting to be moved forward, a mystic power mere mortals could never know or use beneficially, and a primal presence to keep that power where it belongs. All adding meaningful background to its world without needing to say a word of dialogue.

I believe this film to be mutually intelligible to Shinkai’s other works, dealing with his motifs of separation, distance, the importance of acceptance, and learning how to healthily move on. But it is never merely derivative. This time however it is more focused on the connection between the living and the dead, the drive to find resolution, and the continued value of loved ones who have passed away. If we are constantly living in the past, fixated on what was, how can we ever move forward with what can be? The past is where it is for a very reason. Moving beyond to the hopeful and greater possibilities pays more dividends to our own stories more than those stories we have already lived. Especially at the cost of endangering others livelihoods and living spaces. We don’t belong there anymore. We belong in what is to come.

Needless to say at this point but animation is capable of telling serious, thought-provoking, philosophically driven, and valuable stories that can resonate in ways that the medium of live action cinema simply cannot (and vice versa). 

While art will always have value (both tangibly and intangibly) for how it looks, and believe me in this case it sure does look quite something, it would be nothing without how it feels, what it means, and/or how that meaning is important to express. Children Who Chase Lost Voices is ultimately a consoling friend or loved one, who with patience and the best of intentions during the grieving process, whatever or whoever you may be grieving, reminding you that it’s okay to continue living and that doing so is as much honor to those who have passed on as is trying to bring them back, even more and requires more endurance and strength to do so. Let’s get through this together and live on for both them and each other.