The Filmic Time of Coloniality: On Shinkai Makoto’s <i>The Place Promised in Our Early Days</i>

Our Early Days (Kumo no mukō, yakusoku no basho) was released, solidifying the position of his work as that of a decidedly new generation, one stemming neither from the older big-budget cinematic style of Miyazaki nor the previous generation’s anime studio system, symbolized by Gainax. Shinkai debuted as a quintessentially digital-age auteur with his entirely self-created 2001 short film Voices of a Distant Star (Hoshi no koe), perhaps the most concentrated expression of this new aesthetic regime, which came to be known as “sekai-kei” (literally, “world-style”). The Place Promised in Our Early Days (hereafter PPED) is in a doubled sense a Zeitgeist film: on the one hand, its success, its sensibility, its conditions of production, and its visual register make it a production representative of a distinctive shift in the archetypal anime feature; on the other hand its narrative structure places it in direct linkage to the recent boom of “alternative history” films and the politics of the field of significations implicit to this boom. But more specifically, I argue that PPED is itself a vehicle for something else, an expressive device for the question of coloniality, one in which we can read the problem not only of the historical memory and meaning of The Filmic Time of Coloniality: On Shinkai Makoto’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days G a v i n W a l k e r