The Place Promised in Our Early Days

“Against all odds, a promise will be kept.”

Hiroki Fujisawa (Hidetaka Yoshioka) and Takuya Shirakawa (Masato Hagiwara) want to fly a plane they built themselves across the border into the Union, toward the tower that rises there. Their classmate Sayuri Sawatari (Yuuka Nanri) has promised to go too, in an alternate Japan split between north and south. Makoto Shinkai wrote, directed, shot and edited his first feature himself, and the whole film holds to one sensibility.