Toki o kakeru shôjo

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.

This sequel to the terrible 1983 movie The Little Girl Who Conquered Time has many of the flaws of its predecessor. They both look like inexpensive TV movies (although TV movies look better than they did in 1983), and they both have saccharine scores. But while the 1983 movie moved at a crawl and was headache-inducing in its stupidity, this movie has a lively pace and more interesting characters,and is considerably less absurd.

Unlike the 1983 movie or the excellent 2006 animated film that was also a sequel to the original story, Time Traveller does not involve a teenager hopping around through time. Instead, it involves a teenager making one hop, to 1974. The movie has some familiar 70s fashions, but a lot of the 70s details went over my head, I suspect, because I have no idea what Japan looked like back then.

What makes the movie stand out in spite of its poor production values is how the characters' emotional lives were brought out so sharply and affectingly. The movie has likable characters and they have relatable problems.

By most of my criteria for film making, Time Traveller is at best mediocre. But it's one of those B movies that somehow work, creating a better experience than should have been possible. I'm not saying it's a must see, but it is a very likable little film.

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.

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.