Toki o kakeru shôjo

When you start on the foundation of a classic, well-known anime and then fail, that's a double-disappoinment for viewers.

This movie is okay, but underwhelming, with an especially lackluster and anti-climactic ending. Acting by the main character is excellent, but the directing somewhat cliche all the way through. This takes the form of yet another (yawn) time travel movie, without anything exceptional to make it stand out. Thus the 5-star "mediocre" rating.

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.

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!

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.

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.