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!

Owning the book and having heard nothing but good things about this 2010 version, I just had to sink my fangs into the movie, so I bought it from Amazon.

And now having seen it, I am somewhat dumbfounded. The movie is long, very, very long and it takes forever to get almost nowhere, and that was a drag. It was a battle to sit through this movie, and I think I dozed off once actually. That being said, then don't get me wrong, the movie is not bad, far from it. The story told in "Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" was really good, captivating and interesting. The story really swept me up and I got immersed into it right away, it was just a shame that the movie took so long to get almost nowhere.

The cast in "Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" were good enough, people did good jobs with their given roles, though this is far from the best performances I have seen in Japanese movies.

I sincerely doubt that I will be putting this DVD on a second time, because it was too much of a struggle to get through.

I like this live action version much more than the anime version. The story is much better and has a strong nostalgic feeling to it. It is also very touching. The music are very good too.

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.

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.