Anime Review :: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time [2006]

Director - Mamoru Hosoda
Language – English Dub
Runtime – 98 Minutes
Genre – Drama / Sci-Fi. Slice-of-Life.

If you turn off Mamoru Hosoda's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time at approximately one hour and fifteen minutes in, you’ve just watched the best anime feature film of the decade. If you decide, however, to let the final 23 minutes play on, you’ve instead just watched a pretty darn good movie (though, not a pretty damn good one.)

Loosely Adapted from Yasutaka Tsutsui novel by the same name, The Girl… is the story of Makoto Konno, a high school student who finds she has the ability to travel back short distances in time to re-do things after avoiding a fatal accident. Learning of this new talent, she does what any high school student would do; She frivolously jumps around time to prevent being late for class, avoids awkward conversations, and re-lives a single karaoke sessions for ten hours, until finally realizing that her power is having an effect on the people around her and a mysterious number on her arm seems to be slowly counting down.

Hosoda’s landscape to the story is the sort of atmosphere so masterfully created that you can actually feel the warm summer air and smell the food from the vending carts. You can taste the dust kicked up on the baseball field as Makoto and her best friends Chiaki and Kōsuke play catch and you can feel yourself start to get stuffy from the pollen in their air at time. So involving is the backdrop that instead of wondering why you would care about a girl frittering away such an important gift, you smile and remember your idiotic youth and think to yourself "yeah, I’d have probably done this sort of stupid shit too."

Things eventually take a turn for the serious when Mokoto gets careless with her talent and the people around her start to suffer as a consequence to her impulsive behavior as she jumps away from all of life’s unpleasant circumstances.

The film is completely outstanding until suddenly, with the story seemingly wrapping up in fatal results and a lesson in life well learned, we’re treated to some out-of-the-blue twist, a major continuity problem (which I can't get into without spoiling the story) and an impromptu love story to bring us through to the conclusion, none of which are obnoxiously bad, but they do leave a slightly sour aftertaste to what would have otherwise been a one-of-a-kind anime classic.

In the end, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a wonderful little slice-of-life story with a sci-fi spin that's still quite an enjoyable piece of work despite it's slightly left-field outcome.