For Shelly

In celebration of my wife's birthday, I wanted to dedicate my latest AMV to her. The song is one we heard on a episode of ER, and we both kinda liked it (Breakfast at Tiffany's reference!). Anyway, the song was the incomparable Open Your Eyes by Snow Patrol. I've been a Snow Patrol fan ever since. Like most SP songs, it's a great love song (if a little sad).

The anime chosen for this video is the stunningly beautiful The Place Promised In Our Early Days. The visuals are breathtaking, and really should be seen on a full-size TV or monitor to be fully appreciated. The story is a love story, about a guy and girl that meet in middle school, and start to form a relationship. From the wiki:

The anime follows the story of three friends living in Aomori on the northern end of southern Japan: two boys, Hiroki Fujisawa and Takuya Shirakawa, both child prodigies; and one girl, Sayuri Sawatari. In 1996, the three are in eighth grade, their last year of middle school, and they are fascinated by the Hokkaido Tower visible across the Tsugaru Strait to the north.

On the last day before spring break, one of Sayuri's friends, Kana Matsuura, confesses to Takuya that she has romantic feelings for him, but he does not return her feelings. Takuya tells Hiroki that he should date Kana instead, but Hiroki declines, as he is actually romantically interested in Sayuri. Hiroki stays after school for archery practice while Sayuri stays after school for violin practice; they ride the train home together and get to know each other, and Sayuri becomes close friends with the two boys.

The two boys have found a crashed Maritime Self-Defense Force drone plane. Naming it the Bella Ciela, they work on rebuilding the plane, scrounging parts from their workplace, the Emishi Manufacturing factory, with the help of their boss, Mr. Okabe. The three teenagers promise to one day fly to Hokkaido to visit the Tower. However, before they can do this, Sayuri mysteriously disappears during the summer.

Three years later, Takuya and Hiroki have stopped working on the plane, having taken different paths after the grief they suffered at Sayuri's disappearance. Sayuri is revealed to have been hospitalized over the past three years, having developed an extreme form of narcolepsy; she has been sleeping continuously for most of the three years. Her mind is trapped in an unpopulated parallel universe, where she is all alone.

Hiroki has moved to Tokyo where he attends high school. He is haunted by frequent dreams of Sayuri and suffers from depression, leading a miserable and lonely existence. A letter written by Sayuri before she became completely comatose eventually reaches him and he reads it in March 2000, giving him a lead to go looking for her. Though in separate universes, the two manage to make brief, temporary contact, and Hiroki realises that the only way to wake Sayuri is to fly her body over the Tower, to take her to the "promised land of our childhood".

It's a heartbreaking and beautiful story. One of the main themes of the film is "dreams", and when Shelly and I first started dating, she gave me Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, because she knew I loved to read. That meant a lot (I still have the book). Also, I just really wanted to make a video for Shelly, so here it is. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.



Love you, babe!