Review of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) by Simon L — 19 Dec 2009

Oh, Paradox, What a Friend You Can Be.

Life is full of "if I could change just one thing" moments. Or "if I could spend just one more day with them" moments. We all like to think we'd use the Power Over Time for good--though in this character's case, she just seems to be rewinding time and starting over from a past moment, even though I'm pretty sure we're explicitly told that this isn't what's happening. Anyway. The thing is, after saving her own life, the first thing this girl does is go back in time for her pudding. Pudding! I guess we're supposed to see this girl as childish because of it and to see her as slowly becoming more mature over the course of the story, and it's true that her last couple of, well, leaps through time are a lot more selfless. It's also true that she doesn't know how many leaps through time she'll get or if there's even a limit. She doesn't know any of the rules. She doesn't know what price there might be to be paid. But, you know, pudding.

Makoto Konno (in English, which is how I watched it, Emily Hirst) is just an ordinary Japanese teenager. She is in the ranks of the Perpetually Late Anime Girls, and we first see her running desperately late. She screws up on a math test, is a walking disaster area in home ec, and so forth. Anyway, her two best friends are Chiaki Mamiya (Andrew Francis) and Kousuke Tsuda (Alex Zahara). They hang out together and play baseball, mostly. Only one afternoon, Makoto discovers a device which will let her leap through time (yay, title!), and she starts using it to make her life go more the way she wants to. Again, the first thing which happens is that she stops herself from crashing into a train and dying, though she doesn't do that on purpose. It's how she discovers she can do it. Eventually, she discusses it with her aunt, Kazuko Yoshiyama (Saffron Henderson), who tells her to be careful with her powers. Also, she develops a mark on her arm, in a very inconvenient place, which is counting down how many leaps she has left.

Time travel in fiction is interesting, if for no other reason than because it's interesting to see how paradoxes are resolved. Makoto remembers the alternate time streams she followed, by when she changes the past, no one else does. She doesn't seem to age as she slips back and forth, but it may be that she just doesn't use up enough time doing it that it would make much of a difference. It's implied that she takes a lot of tries at some things in order to get them to end the way she wants to. The fact that she carries the knowledge back along the time stream is helpful to her in her quest to get Kosuke a date, but yeah. It is even, at one point, made pretty clear that she goes farther forward than ever--not by leaping forward, which she cannot do, but by just living the day and then leaping farther back. I'm kind of curious as to how the talks with her aunt go from one timeline to another, if you think about it.

It's a very pretty film. There are a couple of sequences (I don't really like calling them "shots," when it's animated, but oh, well) of just the sky or a silhouette of characters or what have you, just one pause in the action to admire the world the characters live in. I think the reason for those moments becomes apparent, or at least it did to me, with information we get toward the end, but by and large, it's just a moment of beauty, a thing not all movies take the time for. And, yes, I have seen movies where I've complained that there are too many of them--[i]Heaven's Gate[/i], I'm looking at you--but I think director Mamoru Hosoda has managed a pretty good balance. Also, several of the shots (there's that word again!) of Makoto leaping, which she does physically, are really lovely. It seems that she goes back farther the bigger run-up she takes, or something, and her leaps are far more graceful than most of what we know about her would imply, though her landings, not so much. The art captures that nicely.

There is, in some circles, great debate as to whether anime is better than western animation or the other way 'round. I find this to be a silly, pointless debate. I would be just as annoyed by certain of the later plot points as I am now regardless of what country the movie had come from--and, indeed, whether it had been animated or not. The first issue I have is that you have to define your terms. Is [i]Toki o kakeru shôjo[/i] better or worse than [i]The Princess and the Frog[/i]? Define your terms. Besides, Japan just flat-out produces more animation than the US does. (Yeah, there's more to the West than just the US, but tell that to the people having the debate!) However, if we're going to get to the real problem I have, it's that, in the US, animation is still seen as kids' stuff, no matter that the best-rated animated shows are primetime ones designed for adults. This movie is clearly intended for teenagers or older, not little kids, but we in the US have a problem with the very idea of that.