Happy Global Shinkai Day!
This was sorta related to the This Week in Free Anime post, but was cool & important enough to deserve its own separate posting. February 28 is Global Shinkai Day, honoring the talents & creativity of the young but now famous anime director Makoto Shinkai.
If you don't know Shinkai's story, then you should go & educate yourself (I'm sure Wikipedia has a lot on him). But to summarize, Shinkai started out as your average Japanese guy & anime fan. He had no professional relationship with anime, but he have the power of passion. He started work on his own anime movie. He wrote it, drew, animated, & edited the whole thing on his Mac, & voiced all the male characters (his wife voicing the female ones), & in 2002 he released "Voices of a Distant Star." The result- an amazing piece of animation & fiction in general, the likes of which unseen by a total amateur. This modern masterpiece became a classic & gained Shinkai instant recognition, fame, & a career in creating more anime films. Only now he has the assistance of anime studios & big budgets. Since then he's created two more masterpieces- "The Place Promised in Our Early Days" & most recently "5 Centimeters Per Second."
In honor of Global Shinkai Day, Crunchyroll is streaming all three of his movies for free for TODAY (Saturday the 28th) ONLY. Best of all, you can even watch them in HD even if you're not a paid CR member. "Voices" & "Early Days" (both available on DVD from ADV) are both available in subtitled format, while "5cm" (currently no longer available on DVD) is up in both subbed & dubbed formats. But this isn't ADV's dub of the movie, but rather a brand new dub by Bang Zoom.
I had previously reported that Bandai had rescue-licensed the title from ADV & issued a new dub for it from Bang Zoom. But then Bandai came out & officially denied they had the license. So while that part may have been false, for whatever reason the part about Bang Zoom redubbing it remained true. But none of that is important right now. What is important is celebrating Global Shinkai Day, & you can do that by watching all three of his amazing works of art for free. Check them out here, while you can:
http://www.crunchyroll.com/group/Global_Shinkai_Day