The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

Kadokawa / Madman

R2 and R4

English overdubbed

OK, it’s a teenage love story but it is very nicely done and has a science fiction element that lifts it above the average.

Makito is a teenage girl, a bit of a tomboy really, who is only average at school. She would rather be playing basketball with her two male friends (NOT boyfriends) Chiaki and Kosuki. One day in the science lab she finds a device that allows her to jump backwards in time. She uses it for trivial things at first, like redoing exams until she gets top grades or restarting the morning so she gets to school on time. Then she discovers a sort of tattoo on her arm and it is counting down – there is a limited number of jumps she can make and she has wasted many of them.

Her outlook changes and she starts to use the time leaps for better purposes but it seems interfering with the past has unintended consequences. She uses a leap to set up Kosuki with a girl, but the outcome is they are nearly killed in a train accident

and she has to use another of her decreasing number of leaps to save them.

Then she finds there is more to Chiaki than she suspected, and after a lot of false starts they finally admit their feelings for each other. Chiaki has a problem, though, and it can only be resolved by using her last time leap.

The first point that struck me about the film is how expressive Makito’s facial features are, given the economy of line and colour of the anime style. It is hard to show much emotion in a two dimensional character but the artists of Madhouse Studios have managed it. They still stick to the traditional wide oval mouth with little detail when their characters shout or cry, but the subtlety shown in Makito’s face as she realises her feelings is far above the norm.

The second point is that Mamoru Hosoda is a fine director. He keeps the action moving and the film doesn’t bog down in sentimentality or get puzzling because of the unexplained science of time leaping. Given the strange mixed genre nature of the story this is quite an achievement. The end result is that we can accept time leaping well before the love interest develops. This is important as the two become intertwined.

The film was not particularly popular or well promoted when it was released in 2006, but since then the word has spread and it has something of a cult following. It will come with a second DVD with the usual extras but in this case I will be interested to see how director Hosoda managed such a story within the anime style.

At my somewhat advanced years I generally don’t find this sort of story very interesting and I was only attracted by the science fiction element of the title. I was surprised. It is really a very good, human film.

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