The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)1

‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’ is a Japanese ani­mated film that is directed by Mamoru Hosoda and writ­ten by Yasutaka Tsutsui (orig­i­nal novel) and Satoko Okudera (screen­play). This is adapted from the manga Toki o Kakeru Shoujo (which trans­lates to ‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Time). The film tells about a girl, Makoto, who gains the abil­ity to time leap back to the past by acci­dent. She first uses the power when she was caught in a fatal acci­dent and able to escape death after she time leap. She then pro­ceeds to time leap again and again for mostly triv­ial mat­ters, not know­ing that there is a limit to the num­ber of times she can leap. By then she real­izes she had already used up all her chances to time leap and it is then when her friend is about to meet the fatal acci­dent that she met before… It is also then when she learns that she is not the only one who can leap through time. The movie is engag­ing by its real­is­tic char­ac­ters. Each and sin­gle one of them faces prob­lem just like all other stu­dents not just in Japan, but the whole world. They face stress from tests, get­ting to school on time and even love mat­ters – a great mime­sis of life that almost every­one is expe­ri­enc­ing or had expe­ri­enced. The plot is also beau­ti­fully crafted, as we fol­low Makoto through her jour­ney of under­stand­ing the con­cept of ‘when you gain, some­one else loses’, a state­ment told by Makoto’s aunt to her. The power to time travel can eas­ily be mis­used and this movie is no excep­tion. The beauty of the film also lies here. Luckily enough, Makoto is a non-ambitious girl. In fact, she time leap mostly to escape from ques­tions that she do not want to answer. Her power to time leap allows her to avoid from real­ity. In the begin­ning, she only time leap for her­self. There is also an instance in which she did very well for a test. However, as the movie pro­gresses, she begins to time leap in order to help her friends. During sub­se­quent time leaps when she went back too much in time that she needs to go through the test again, she did not care much about the test already. She chooses to focus on the rela­tion­ship between her and her friends and the love life of her friends. The abil­ity to time leap, to her, is a chance for her to ‘trial and error’ on the ways she can do to improve cer­tain things in the rela­tion­ship prob­lems. Ultimately, Makoto uses her final time leap to solve every­thing for other peo­ple, but none for her­self. Time leap had given Makoto a new life, a matured Makoto who under­stands the impor­tance of not avoid­ing. Perhaps the only flaw I find in the film is the part when Chiaki is telling Makoto about him­self. He just says every­thing through expo­si­tion and it becomes bor­ing with all the new infor­ma­tion being just told through words. This greatly reduced the cin­e­matic feel of learn­ing some­thing new. This sim­ple yet mean­ing­ful film is suit­able for view­ers of all ages. Unlike most sci­ence fic­tion story with a pinch of real­ism, this movie is the oppo­site – a real­is­tic story with a pinch of sci­ence fic­tion. With a nice pace and mov­ing for­ward sto­ry­line, this mas­ter­piece deserves a 4 out of 5 stars. Reviewed by Wee Kiat