Toki o kakeru shôjo

Watched this movie on Netflix streaming a couple of weeks back! fantastic movie!!

The plot is fairly straight-forward - scientist mother invents a liquid that enables time-travel. She has an accident and is in near coma. but she asks the daughter for a favor and the daughter has to go back in time to fix it. Except that the daughter goes back in time to the wrong year.

How the daughter still manages to fix things for her mom is the rest of the story.

I can't really find fault with anything in the movie - except for maybe the overall concept of time travel. It was shot really well and when I connected the dots, it was like "whoa" - that's awesome!

This is the fourth version of Toki o kakeru shojo (Girl who leaped through time) that was made for the big screen, and is truest to being the continuous story to the movie by the same title made in 1983 starring Tomoyo Harada as Kazuko Yoshiyama.

Akari Yoshiyama (Riisa Naka) is the daughter of Kazuko Yoshiyama (Narumi Yasuda). Kazuko is the original girl who've leaped through time 38 years ago in 1972. Although Kazuko's memory was erased about the incident, she still subliminally remembers about Kazuo Fukamachi (Kanji Ishimatsu). One day Kazuko falls victim to an automobile accident, and becomes comatose. Akari decides to leap back to the 1970s to find Fukamachi to help her mother.

Although the story follows the original movie well, the production is rather coarse and details and the visuals of each scenes are crude, lowering the visual experience of the entire movie. Maybe it's because this is the debut feature length movie for director Masaaki Taniguchi. Compared to the original that was directed by the great Nobuhiko Oobayashi, the production falls short in almost all details. I wish the casting was better as well ( except for Riisa Naka). The actors just don't catch the mood of the movie - it's supposed to be a bitter sweet romantic movie, but I just couldn't get any romantic feelings from the actors.

I give this version 4.5/10, and hope that someone will remake this version with quality that matches the original 1983 version.

I saw this film as part of the "Imagine" film festival 2011 in Amsterdam. It was announced as a (start quote) moving live-action comedy about time travel and impossible loves (end quote). All of those qualifications being true, the overwhelming number of paradoxes, inconsistencies and impossibilities come in the way of fully enjoying the story. Maybe I was prejudiced, having seen the much better film "The Door" (Anno Saul, 2009) that same afternoon, also having time travel as its main ingredient.

The human drama elements compensate a lot of these problems. Those will carry the story for the full two hours that this film takes of your time. It is precisely where the words "moving" and "loves" in the announcement stand for. It will entertain a broad audience.

The net result was that I never got bored. But I had mixed feelings nevertheless, while imagining how a script like this could be turned into something more acceptable in the technical sense. I have no solution handy, however, and maybe we should leave this as an exercise for the reader.

When leaving the theater, I gave a "satisfactory" score for the public prize competition. The SF lover in me was annoyed by the many impossibilities in the story, but the overall result was nevertheless entertaining with several hilarious as well as some moving moments. I'm sure it will attract the average viewer. You can take your complete family with you to enjoy this film, but you should leave your geek nephew at home since he will spoil the afternoon while pointing out at least 30 time travel paradoxes.

The live action version of "Toki wo kakeru shoujo" is lots of fun, and it can stand on its own, even if you haven't watched the anime version.

The story is simple enough. Akari's mother is doing some secret research. When she has an accident, she tells Akari that it is a time traveling formula, and asks her to go back in time and find a boy she knew from high school. Akari goes to her mother's workplace and drinks the formula, even if she doesn't really believe it will work. But then she finds herself in the past. But things are not as they should be...

"Toki wo kakeru shoujo" is a charming movie, that has a not overly complicated plot, but very interesting characters, with whom it is easy to fall in love with and care for. The acting is quite good, and brings the story close to the viewer. You will care for Akari and the people she meets in her time traveling adventures. It is actually difficult to make a story fascinating, but everyone involved in this movie makes it feel easy. It is a little bit slow in some moments, specially close to the end, but that is not much of a problem when you don't want to see those characters leave you.

Totally worth watching.

I thought the pacing of this movie was a bit slow, but it was still pretty entertaining. It was almost like 3 movies mashed into one, being that there are three main focuses. The young woman who stars as the main character desires to find a mysterious man from her mother's past, find her father, and pursue a romantic interest simultaneously. The thing is, it manages to focus on all of these plot lines succinctly and fully rounds out the characters. The only the thing I would note is the relatively low production quality and often cheesy special effects. I would say it's more of a great work of storytelling rather than a great work of cinematography.