The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

[Guest Post from Starfoxy, as part of the Doves & Serpents and The Exponent Blog Swap. Starfoxy blogs at The Exponent, and has terrible taste in movies.]

After I signed up to take on the Rogue Cinema spot for our D&S/Exponent blog swap I found myself lying in bed wondering what on earth I was thinking. Practically none of the movies I watch could be described as “legendary,” “deep,” “complex,” or anything approaching what would be necessary to leave you a “different person than when you embarked.” I could blame the fact that I have kids, but that’s not really fair to them. The real problem is that my taste in movies hasn’t changed much since I was about 9.

I first realized I was different when I went to see an evening showing of Doug’s First Movie., and I was the only person in the theater. Unless you count my sister, but she was only there because my mom made her drive me; it was still a month or so before I turned 16 and could drive myself.  So here I am, nearly 30 and every Tuesday afternoon you can find me watching the latest episode of Bleach (Seriously, I know!) on Hulu. Truly, I am shining beacon of good taste and refinement.

What can someone like me, with my terrible taste in movies offer all you erudite folks? The best I can offer you is a movie that you might have been inclined to avoid because it looks too childish. So if you can get past the idea that cartoons, like Trix, are for kids then a whole new world of (mostly Japanese) movies opens up to you. Still with me? Good. Here we go!

At the top of my list titled “Movies that I think Regular People would like”  is  Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl who Leapt through Time. It is based off a novel from 1967 titled “Toki o Kakeru Sh?jo” (The girl who dashes through time). I put this movie at the top of my list because I absolutely loved it, and my husband really liked it too. The animation doesn’t feel at all childish, and it has practically none of the stereotypical anime style that many people associate with animated movies from Japan.

The main protagonist is Makoto, a high school girl from Tokyo who is an earnest girl, though a bit lazy and still rather childish. She spends her afternoons playing baseball with her two best friends Chiaki (red haired, easy going, carefree) and K?suke (bright, handsome, and hardworking).

The movie starts with Makoto having a thoroughly bad day; she’s late for school, does terrible on a quiz, burns herself frying some shrimp, her little sister ate her pudding cup and so on. After her terrible day, while putting away some textbooks she gets the feeling she’s being watched and goes looking for the suspicious person in an apparently empty chemistry lab. While snooping, she slips and falls, landing on something that looks like a walnut, which mysteriously disappears after she lands on it. Later on her way home, biking downhill towards a train crossing and an approaching train, she discovers her brakes don’t work and she is thrown from her bike in front of the on-coming train. Instead of dying in a mid-air collision with the train, Makoto lands comfortably where she was about 4 minutes in the past at the top of the hill-o-death. She sees everything she just saw a few minutes ago, and can’t quite make sense of what just happened.

She confides in her aunt, a classy, smart lady who works in an art museum. The aunt tells Makoto that what happened to her was a time leap- something she (the aunt) was once able to do. From there the movie follows Makoto fiddling around with her ability to move through time. If she takes a big running leap she can move backwards (and only backwards) through time. The plot from here on out is somewhat hard to describe, because she keeps doing bits of time over and over again. Sometimes she leaps back just a few moments, other times she leaps all the way back to a previous day. (It’s all very wibbly wobbly.)

One thing that I found particularly enjoyable about the movie was how innocent it was. Makoto didn’t use her ability to travel back in time in order to play the stock market and get disgustingly rich (as is a common theme in time travel movies) or anything really bad or greedy. Instead she went back in time to re-do things she was embarrassed about, or to have one more hour to play with her friends. Her initial efforts work out well for herself, but result in people around her dealing with unpleasant consequences. One example is that her unexpectedly and uncharacteristically good score on the pop quiz results in K?suke (the studious friend) feeling the need to study more, which causes him to turn down a romantic advance from a shy girl who just barely worked up the nerve to ask him out.

Makoto finally gets the hang of making things work out well for both herself *and* the people around her (including setting K?suke up with the girl) and everything seems pretty great when two things happen. First, on a beautiful evening bike ride, her friend Chiaki admits his love for her, and asks if she wants to start going out with him; she panics. She re-does that moment over and over again trying to prevent him from asking her, and ends up avoiding the situation completely. She was so content with their friendship that any change was completely unwelcome to her, and what’s more she was frustrated by her inability to prevent it with time leaps. Second, she discovers a number on her arm where she landed on the walnut-thing, which is the first indication that the number of times she is able to leap through time is limited. She later confirms this by observing the number decrease as she uses her leaps.

Makoto continues using her leaps to fix and re-do little bits of time, but never really solving any of the underlying problems with her life. This continues until she ends up recklessly using her last leap to avoid an awkward phone conversation with Chiaki, who surprisingly asks if she’s been time leaping. Her annoyance at herself for using her last leap on something so stupid rapidly turns to bald-faced terror as she sees that K?suke and his new girlfriend borrowed her bike (the one with broken brakes) and were headed down the hill-o-death towards the same train that almost killed her at the start of the movie. Unable to leap through time, Makoto  is completely helpless to stop the collision that she knows is coming.

I don’t want to give away the ending, so I’ll leave the synopsis there, and encourage you to watch the movie yourself.

This movie has a similar feel to Groundhog Day, but while Groundhog Day is primarily about overcoming selfishness, The Girl who Leapt Through Time is primarily about growing up. Her desire to do the same day over and over again until it was safe, familiar, and in her eyes, perfect, paralleled her desire to keep her relationship with Chiaki exactly how it was. Her unwillingness to leave behind what she was used to reflected her unwillingness to leave behind her childhood.

I liked this movie for all sorts of reasons, but what kind of mo-fem blogger would I be if I didn’t discuss this movie in terms of feminism? Well I have good news for you! This movie rang all my feminist bells. It has a female protagonist! And she wasn’t a princess! It passes the Bechdel test with flying colors! Makoto is friends with girls *and* boys. She grows as a character during the movie, and learns to solve her own problems. The romance in this movie is reasonable, and relevant to the plot. Makoto is a multidimensional character, with needs, and foibles. I was also really pleased that she had (living!) parents, and little sister, and yet the movie wasn’t full of hand-wringing about how difficult it is  to have a relationship with a mom or a sister.

So, while my taste in movies may be somewhat childish (and you could watch this movie with kids) this is a good movie and I think even people with very high class tastes would enjoy it.