Children Who Chase Lost Voices

Long before Makoto Shinkai became the undisputed heavyweight champion of "star-crossed lovers separated by cosmic irony" with Your Name (2016), he took a wild, high-stakes detour into the subterranean depths of Agartha. Released in 2011, Children Who Chase Lost Voices is the black sheep of the Shinkai family—a sprawling, 116-minute fantasy epic that looks like a Hayao Miyazaki film but carries the heavy, melancholic soul of a man who spends way too much time staring at train tracks and power lines. I watched this on a laptop while my cat, Barnaby, insisted on sitting directly on the "Enter" key, which actually made the dramatic pauses in the first act feel much more profound than they probably were.

For those who know Shinkai primarily for his hyper-realistic raindrops and teenage longing, this film is a bit of a shock to the system. It follows Asuna, voiced with a delicate stoicism by Hisako Kanemoto (Sailor Moon Crystal), a lonely girl who spends her afternoons listening to a crystal radio on a mountaintop. After being saved from a monster by a mysterious boy named Shun (Miyu Irino), she gets swept up in a quest to the underworld of Agartha. Her companion isn’t a plucky hero, but her teacher, Mr. Morisaki (Kazuhiko Inoue, legendary for voicing Kakashi in Naruto), whose motivation for finding this lost world is far more desperate and adult than Asuna’s: he wants to bring his wife back from the dead.

The Ghibli Shadow and the Shinkai Light

It’s impossible to talk about this film without addressing the elephant in the room: it looks exactly like a Studio Ghibli production. From the character designs to the ancient technology and the lumbering "Quetzalcoatl" deities, Shinkai was clearly aiming for that Castle in the Sky (1986) sense of wonder. But where Miyazaki’s adventures often feel like a warm hug, Shinkai’s world is cold, indifferent, and frequently terrifying. It is essentially a Studio Ghibli fever dream filtered through a lens of existential dread.

While some critics at the time dismissed it as a mere imitation, looking back from a post-2014 perspective, you can see Shinkai testing his muscles. This was his first real attempt at a feature-length narrative with a traditional structure, moving away from the episodic nature of 5 Centimeters per Second. The film captures that specific 2010s era of digital animation where the backgrounds started to look better than real life, yet the characters still felt hand-drawn and fragile. The way the light hits the meadows of Agartha is classic Shinkai—gorgeous, lens-flared, and just a little bit lonely.

A Journey Where the Destination is Grief

The film’s greatest strength is its refusal to be a simple "rescue the princess" adventure. Asuna’s journey is aimless because she is a child who doesn't quite understand what she’s looking for. Morisaki, on the other hand, provides the film's dark heartbeat. His descent into madness is far more compelling than any of the magical creatures they encounter, reminding us that this is a 2011 film made for an audience grappling with the permanence of loss.

The middle act can feel a bit like a slog—a common critique of Shinkai's longer works before he mastered the pacing of Weathering With You. There are long stretches of walking and world-building that don't always pay off, including a subplot involving a young girl named Mana (Rina Hidaka) that feels like it belonged in a different movie. However, the score by Tenmon—who worked on almost all of Shinkai's early projects—keeps the emotional momentum going even when the plot wanders off into the woods. It’s a sweeping, orchestral departure from the melancholic piano pieces of their earlier collaborations, and it sells the "epic" scale Shinkai was so clearly hungry to achieve.

Why It Vanished Into the Shadows

So, why is this film rarely mentioned alongside The Garden of Words or Your Name? It’s a bit of an oddity. It’s too dark for small children (there is some genuine body horror involving the "Shadow" creatures) and perhaps too "fantasy-trope-heavy" for the fans who loved Shinkai’s grounded, urban romances. It’s a film caught between two worlds—much like Agartha itself. It also had the misfortune of being overshadowed by the rise of Mamoru Hosoda during that same era, whose Summer Wars and Wolf Children were capturing the "next Miyazaki" zeitgeist more effectively.

Yet, there is something deeply rewarding about revisiting Children Who Chase Lost Voices. It’s a messy, ambitious, and visually stunning exploration of why we can’t let go of the people we’ve lost. It doesn't offer easy answers or magical resurrections. Instead, it leaves you with the quiet realization that "goodbye" is the hardest word to learn, but the only one that lets you keep walking.

If you’ve only ever seen Shinkai’s modern blockbusters, do yourself a favor and track this one down. It’s a fascinating look at a director trying to find his voice by shouting into the mouth of a different cave. It’s not a perfect adventure, but it’s a beautiful one, and it serves as a necessary bridge between the intimate indie animator he was and the global powerhouse he eventually became. Just be prepared for a bit of a cry—and maybe keep a piece of toast nearby to distract the cat.