OF HUMANITY AND THE STARS

RAHM JETHANI - Editor-In-Chief, 2nd Year, English & Japanese

At the end of the world, what will give us hope?

SPOILER WARNING FOR PLANETARIAN: CHIISANA HOSHI NO YUME AND PLANETARIAN: HOSHI NO HITO!

Planetarian: Hoshi no Hito is a strange film. It is listed as the movie sequel to Planetarian: Chiisana Hoshi no Yume, which is a five-episode OVA series that adapts material from the Planetarian visual novel. Plus, Hoshi no Hito’s story is directly described to be “epilogue content”. Despite this information though, and after watching all the Planetarian anime material (including the disappointing prequel, Snow Globe), I strongly disagree with this consensus. If one was to watch anything Planetarian-related, it should exclusively be the Hoshi no Hito movie. It is everything the original OVA series is, but it also includes vital context that further echoes the themes presented within the original work.

The story of Planetarian is a tragedy. The world has been destroyed for a long time, with murderous, non-sentient machines roaming the streets. The atmosphere is shrouded by everpresent pollution, making it lethal to breathe without a filtering mask. Humanity isn’t even on its last legs; instead it crawls. Ideas of happiness and joy are either lost entirely, or are just far-gone dreams for those old enough to remember better times. We follow the main character, Kuzuya, who falls into the former category. His lifestyle of scavenging and pillaging has turned him into a shell of a person, wrecking the same havoc as the robots in order to survive. While his personality is bland, his characterization effectively communicates the crippled state of humanity. His characterization is important to pay attention to when he meets Hoshino Yumemi, a peaceful robotic attendant of an abandoned planetarium. Although he is annoyed by Yumemi’s optimism and constant needs, Kuzuya makes the choice to help her, despite what it meant for his survival. While we’re never given an explicit reason why he helps Yumemi, it can be inferred that the mundane and non-aggressive interactions with her stirred a feeling of connection within Kuzuya. The strings of despair began to loosen around his heart.

After helping Yumemi repair the planetarium’s projector, Kuzuya became entranced by the projections of the stars. No person in this age has ever seen these celestial bodies, and the sight of them gave the one human being present a sense of yearning. This sequence, perhaps, is meant to represent how even the most closedoff person, whose morals and actions have removed them so far from the concept of humanity, can still discover hope and cling onto it desperately.

Ultimately though, Planetarian is a tragedy. After Kuzuya relearns the feeling of being human, and after he finally is able to emotionally connect with Yumemi despite her robotic nature, Yumemi gets killed by a stray machine. As her last wish, she prays that human beings and machines can still go to the same heaven, and that God doesn’t split heaven in two. This message communicates the idea that the difference between people and machines is not a perceived sense of humanity, but instead that hope is what makes someone human. In this sense, Yumemi was already more human than Kuzuya, which makes her role as Kuzuya’s catalyst to remember humanity all the more poignant.

Hoshi no Hito’s “epilogue content” takes the form of an elderly Kuzuya traveling from settlement to settlement, hauling heavy projector equipment in order to show the stars to humanity’s survivors. He has, over the years, required the titular name “Hoshi no Hito”, meaning “Person of the Stars”. This epilogue (although it is interspersed throughout the film) is essential to communicate how powerful hope can be. Although he is eventually exiled by people who have forgotten what it is to dream, Kuzuya’s lifelong dedication to spreading the idea of humanity is beautiful, and the ending seems to agree too, as it shows him joining Yumemi in a shared heaven. Hoshi no Hito is a touching reminder that even in the worst times, hope endures, and its spark is what makes us truly human.