A still from the movie Voices of a Distant Star [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

5. Voices of a Distant Star: 8.3

Voices of a Distant Star premiered in Japan in February 2002. It chronicles a long-distance relationship between two close friends. One is a soldier, who attempts to communicate with his friend over the course of an interstellar war using text messages that take years to reach their recipient.

Jump to the year of 2046, the anime starts with a schoolgirl named Mikako Nagamine who is recruited to the United Nations Space Army to fight in a war against a group of aliens called the Tarsians. Mikako's friend Noboru Terao remains on Earth. The two continue to communicate across space using email on their mobile telephones. As the Lysithea travels deeper into space, messages take increasingly longer to reach Noboru on Earth, and the time-lag in their correspondence eventually spans years.

"The theme is that communication between people matters. I used cell phones in the story because that is what is commonly used in Japan to communicate, but there are many countries where people don't use cell phones. Communication from the heart is ever-lastingly important wherever you are, so I assume that is why the anime appealed to so many people," Makoto Shinkai once commented.