Tears from Time Leaping

So here’s the digest of the movie I craved to see.

Usually when I watch movies (never to forget I’m a big film person), I measure the quality of the movie by how many times I got goosebumps. The more goosebumps the better the movie is. Well for this movie Toki o Kakeru Shojo (literally means “the girl who leaps time”) I got it three times and that would count as a lot. I think I got it twice for Saving Private Ryan. Additionally, there are levels of goosebumps like a soft little one, to really shivering level, and this time I got two big ones and one middle-scale.

In yesterday’s description I could only tell you how popular it is, so today I’ll try to get to what’s so popular a little more precisely and the storyline as well as personal comments.

The main character of the story is Konno Makoto, a high school student living in Shitamachi (old downtown) Tokyo with her parents and her younger sister Miyuki. She loved to play baseball with two of her classmates and moreover very best friends – Mamiya Chiaki, the cheerful clown of the class, and Tsuda Kosuke, a bright student aiming for medical college.
One day when Makoto was cleaning a classroom with another good friend Hayakawa Yuri, she stumbled in the chemistry experiment room and goes through a weird experience. The same afternoon on the way back home, her brake broke at a railroad crossing and she crashed into the train – supposedly. This is when she first experienced “time leaping”.
As days passed she got the hang of time leaping, and started to enjoy her special ability fulfilling her little desires such as eating the pudding that she wanted to but had been eaten by somebody else in the past, or to go to karaoke as many times as she liked. From one point, however, when one of her buddies Kosuke was confessed love from a younger girl in the same volunteer club, the strong bond beyond gender between Makoto, Chiaki and Kosuke started to change.

It’s really... itchy, it’s young. Very heartaching, too. It’s hard to describe this feeling you get watching this movie... it just squeezes your heart. By using this small prop of “time leaping” the movie fully brings forth the sweet fragile memories and feelings from your youth with great impact. I can even say it’s like the Japanese version of The Butterfly Effect.

The director of this movie is Hosoda Mamoru, who actually directed Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle till the middle (in the end, Miyazaki changed his mind and took over the job). So feeling-wise, or taste-wise or however you’d describe it, it’s sort of like a successor movie to Whisper of the Heart (trusting it’s recognition as a Ghibli film).

Personally, the most striking was the pureness of Makoto. How pure? Well, I guess the first *Nobita-naki (geez I bet this is truly Japanese) in my film-life explains it all.
*Nobita is a character from the national manga Doraemon, and he cries like a water
fountain exploding.

”Time leaping” can take Makoto in the past and in the future. The first half of the movie illustrates that with a touch of comedy, and even those who are kind of reluctant in watching SF movies can enjoy it with much laughter. But as the story proceeds towards the latter half, the movie reveals its true vision and values when all the time – time that is supposed to have piled up, the memories that should have existed, the stolen memories – all fall heavily upon Makoto and makes her realize what changes and what does not.

Having said that, I believe that the main theme of this story is that there is nothing that does not change over time. Time moves on and people move too. That’s probably why people seek for things that don’t change.

By the way, after I wrote yesterday I did a little more research about the movie and the cinemas that show it: well, it turned out that although the number of theaters showing has increased, the number of the actual films is the same. That means, that when some place starts showing, some other place stopped showing. So, if you live in Japan and understand Japanese and happen to live near a movie theater that shows this movie Toki o Kakeru Shojo, you are super lucky. YOU HAVE TO SEE IT! Or if any of you are engaged in the international film industry, please do buy it and show it overseas!

...don’t sound like probable conditions, huh?