AKA: 星空キセキ

Genre: Sci-fi romance

Length: Web release, 27 minutes

Distributor: Currently licensed by Sentai Filmworks.

Content Rating: 10+ (brief male nudity)

Related Series: N/A

Also Recommended: Voices of a Distant Star.

Notes: Hoshizora Kiseki is currently streaming on The Anime Network as well. The R1 DVD release pairs this ONA with the unrelated Coffee Samurai.

Rating:

Hoshizora Kiseki

Synopsis

A cheerful high school girl named Kozue loves astronomy, and is heading off on a trip by herself to visit a shooting star expected to land in two weeks. As she heads off, she keeps hearing a mysterious voice calling out to her, one that sounds male. And later on her travels she meets up with a boy in a white space suit named Ginga on a hill one night. What could he be doing there?

Review

What a strange little story.

Hoshizora Kiseki is not an anime easy to pin the genre of. It's part field trip anime (the trip to the shooting star), part comedy (Kozue's interaction with her friend), and part romance with the two leads. And it tries to do all of this in 27 minutes.

Considering its short length, Hoshizora Kiseki does a satisfactory enough job of introducing you to its peppy, likable heroine Kozue. I also like how they explain her relationship with Ginga, which is not as random an encounter as it seems at first. Ginga himself isn't much special - the typical "I must do this" kind of guy bossed around by other, older adults - but I've seen this type of character done much worse in anime.

For a short ONA, the art can be pretty nice at times, especially with the sky details. It's no Voices of a Distant Star, but for what was probably a low-budget short, it's more than passable. The same cannot be said for the music, which is super repetitive, sounding like a rejected Kodocha background music piece repeated several times over. It gets annoying fast.

Like with Wish Upon the Pleiades, though, I wish there was more to this. Granted, the ONA does wraps up nicely (as good as a one-shot can, anyway) but I wouldn't have minded an extra 10-15 minutes to expand more on the space aspects with Ginga. Once Kozue meets Ginga, it's like the rest of the ONA had the fast-forward button pressed on it.

Too short to be of much substance, but too simple to be stretched out to a movie or TV show, Hoshizora Kiseki is kinda of stuck in a sort of anime limbo. If you got a free half hour to spare and like astronomy, though, you'll probably enjoy it.

It's a nice, short story with likable characters, but another half hour would've gone a long way with the pacing issues. — Tim Jones

Recommended Audience: The only objective content in all of Hoshizora Kiseki is some brief, non-sexual male nudity. There's nothing else objectionable, though Kozue's parents being pretty trusting of letting their daughter go off by herself for two weeks across country to see a shooting star might annoy some parents.