The Girl Who Leapt Through Time Reviews

Based on the much-adapted young-adult novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Hosoda Mamoru's animated fantasy tell the story of a high school senior who finds she can travel backwards through time. Tomboyish, 17-year-old Makoto Konno (voiced by Emily Hirst) is in her senior year of high school and has no idea what she wants to do with her life. She's an average student, something of a klutz and endless exasperated with her bratty younger sister, but she's got great friends in brainy Kousuke Tsuda (Alex Zahara) and cutie Chiaki Mamiya (Andrew Francis), who transferred in a the beginning of the semester. The three are inseparable. The story begins on June 13th, a hot, lazy day right before the end of the school year. Makoto gets up late, as usual, and has to rush to school, where nothing goes right. She fails a pop quiz in math class, creates total chaos in home ec by setting fire to a pan of hot oil, drops a stack of books she's responsible for taking to the science lab and fumbles every play in the casual baseball game she, Kousuke and Chiaki play after class. And then it gets worse: As she's cycling home, her brakes fail while she's zooming down a steep hill that ends on the train tracks. Unable to stop, Makoto is thrown in front of a moving train and killed… except that she isn't. She wakes up on the ground, a few feet from the tracks and a few minutes before the train comes through. It turns out that Makota has mysteriously developed the ability to travel back in time, and once she gets a handle on her power, she uses to undo all the embarrassments of that June day, and then to meddle in her classmates lives. Her intentions are benevolent, but gradually realizes that every change she makes affects others, and not necessarily for the better. The first animated version of popular Tsutsui's story is somewhere between remake and sequel: It updates the action from 1965 to the present and plays with the specifics of the story (Makoto's aunt, Kazuko, shares the name of the main character in the original version), but stays close to Tsutsui's psychologically astute yet gentle spin on time-travel cliches. Makoto's misadventures are specifically geared to the concerns and perspectives of teenagers, while avoiding the luridness of similarly themed films like THE BUTTERLFY EFFECT (2004), and the resolution refreshingly bittersweet.