The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

To be frank, I was kinda terrified that we were dealing with an An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge scenario while watching Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (alias Toki o Kakeru Shōjo, 2006).

See, this delightful but in the end melancholic anime follows a precocious teenage girl, who finds herself able to leap back in time after a near death experience involving some failed bicycle brakes and a moving train.

Ergo, my concerns were valid if you’re familiar with the Ambrose Bierce story, famously adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone (S05.E22), where a captured Confederate spy escapes his Union captors during his execution, whose ending I will not spoil for those uninitiated because the final twist is well earned. 

Turns out my fears were mostly unfounded as the girl, Makoto (Konno), uses her new found abilities for silly and selfish reasons at first before graduating into trying to fix or ret-con things and play matchmaker for her friends. And all the while, she also tries to sort out her own confused feelings over a boy named Chiaki (Ishida).

However, Makoto soon learns that the more you mess around with history to try and 'fix' things, the more chaotic and dangerous the present can get, which means it also owes a nod to Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, which officially entered 'the butterfly effect' into the popular lexicon.

And through her best intended machinations, she puts one of her best friends in mortal danger just as Makoto finds out too late she only had a finite amount of time leaps.

Loved this one. Loved it. 

The animation is breathtaking, and the voice acting fits perfectly with a special shout-out to Riisa Naka as Makato and Yuki Sekido as her younger sister, Miyuki, and their running feud over some pilfered pudding. And Naka just captures her spirited character's awkward gung-ho-ness effortlessly.

See, to make the time jumps work Makato has to actually make a physical jump; and the further she jumps the further back in time she goes, leading to some pretty hysterical aerial aerobatics and crash-landings for our girl.

How does it all shake out. Sorry. Won’t spoil this one either. It's that good. Cannot recommend this one enough, Fellow Programs.

Originally posted on January 21, 2019, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) Madhouse :: Happinet :: Kadokawa Pictures :: Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Co. :: Memory Tech :: Q-Tec :: Bandai Entertainment / EP: Takeshi Yasuda / CP: Tsuguhiko Kadokawa / P: Shin'ichirô Inoue, Jungo Maruta, Masao Maruyama / CP: Jennifer Fairweather / AP: Chiyako Slawinski / D: Mamoru Hosoda / W: Satoko Okudera, Yasutaka Tsutsui (novel) / C: Yoshihiro Tomita / E: Shigeru Nishiyama / M: Kiyoshi Yoshida / S: Riisa Naka, Takuya Ishida, Mitsutaka Itakura, Ayami Kakiuchi, Mitsuki Tanimura, Yuki Sekido