The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

Directed by: Mamoru Hosoda

Starring: Riisa Naka, Takuya Ishida, Mitsutaka Itakura

The more anime I see, the more I realize that I should just stick to the movies. For one thing, they look SO much better, some of these movies are just beautiful (like this one). For another thing, I don’t have to try and keep track of whatever insane plot twists they come up with, because they have less time to try that shit in a movie! It still happens, of course… like in this one!

A high school girl finds that she has the ability to travel through time by physically leaping a long distance and concentrating real hard. At first, she uses this ability to do things like eat pudding and to prevent herself from getting hurt by all the bad luck she originally had that first day. Eventually she realizes that every time she does something good for herself, it means that something bad is happening to someone else (not due to any sci-fi reasoning behind the time travel or anything, just because that’s what happens when you make someone else get hurt in an accident instead of you) and she starts trying to use her abilities for the good of others. Then… the ending happens.

I actually really liked this movie, up until about the last ten minutes. Seriously, it’s really good up through that point, and then it just gets bizarre. It turns out that the reason she can travel through time (and apparently only a set number of times) was because she accidentally used a device from the future left by one of her friends, who is also from the future. He came back in time to see a painting or something. What doesn’t make sense is that, once she finds out, he has to leave. I’m not going to get too detailed because I’m going to recommend that you see this movie if you like movies that are mostly fun, but I’ll just say that I didn’t understand a lot of things about the ending.

Anyway, yeah, most of this movie was really good. It had a good sense of humor about itself, but balanced out the over-the-top comedy with some really thoughtful dramatic scenes and some very tense action sequences. It had well fleshed-out characters (at least, it seemed that way until the very end), and it didn’t take time travel too seriously, so I couldn’t really get mad at that (again, until the end). Good stuff. Mostly.