Mamoru Hosoda Retrospective: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
With the recent release of famed anime director Mamoru Hosoda’s latest film Belle in Western cinemas, it’s an ideal time to look back at his previous movies and witness the development of his career. His earliest animation director work, in 1999, was for the Digimon franchise, and two of these short films were mashed together to form part of what was released as a Frankenstein’s monster-like abomination in the West as Digimon: The Movie. I may sometimes suffer for anime, dear readers, but there’s no way in hell I’m suffering through that.
In 2005, Hosoda made his feature anime directorial debut with the One Piece movie Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island. I’ve never watched a single episode nor read a single panel of One Piece, so I’m going to ignore that one. It’s also never been officially released in English, so that doesn’t help.
As far as I’m concerned, Hosoda’s career really took off with his 2006 animated adaptation of the 1967 novel The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Hosoda’s version was in fact the seventh screen version of the material, it had previously been adapted as various films and television series. To my knowledge, Hosoda’s anime version was the story’s first introduction to Western audiences, though since then at least one live action movie has been released in English.
Although the film’s intended Japanese audience would have had more than a passing familiarity with its source material, or at least its other adaptations, Western viewers must watch without its decades-spanning cultural context. How does The Girl Who Leapt Through Time hold up as a standalone movie, and what about in comparison to Hosoda’s later films?
Anyone aware of the premise of Bill Murray’s celebrated comedy Groundhog Day will recognise the central conceit of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Teenage protagonist Makoto Konno accidentally stumbles into a limited time-travel ability, that allows her to re-live the same day over and over again, making different choices each time. The film is slow to start, but soon picks up once she starts experimenting with her (slightly unpredictable) ability. Some initially funny unintended consequences gradually become more serious in nature, as the butterfly effect spreads in various ways. Her selfish actions lead to friends and classmates coming to harm, and ultimately tragedy.
Makoto’s drive to micromanage not just her own life, but that of her friends, causes her to waste an extremely precious resource, and it’s only once it’s too late to make amends does she realise the grave ramifications of her actions. I won’t spoil the details here, but the narrative does take a hard left turn towards the end, which brings some pleasing drama to what otherwise may have been a fairly forgettable, if sometimes amusing, shaggy dog tale.
As with all time-travel stories, the plot doesn’t hold together when considered too deeply, and the ultimate resolution feels just a little too tidy, and even somewhat unsatisfying. It relies on some very shaky logic, made worse because many details about how the time travel actually works are left unexplained. For example, when Makoto leaps back in time, what happens to the version of her from that timeline? Is she erased? Displaced? Murdered? Does she take her place, or is she duplicated? (It seems not to be the latter.) Does she only appear in the place that her past counterpart was at that time in her history? It’s all left very vague. There’s no Doc Brown to explain with chalkboard diagrams.
Despite the shortcomings of the plot (something we’ll see as a recurrent issue with Hosoda’s later works), at least the characters are convincing. Makoto is a typical self-absorbed teenage girl, bickering with her younger sister about stolen pudding. She makes changes to causality without considering the effect it will have on others. Though once she learns of these consequences, she really leans into them for purposes like setting up her male friend with his secret female admirer. I did find this particular sideplot adorable.
There is a kind of half-baked romantic sublot between Makoto and her ginger-haired friend Chiaki, but it’s never fully developed because of his Deus Ex Machina-like role in the plot. Mostly, Makoto comes across as immature and flighty with him, but perhaps that isn’t unrealistic for a 17-year-old girl. The film ends with their relationship unresolved, which I suppose is meant to be bittersweet, or at least a little melancholy. I felt unmoved though, probably because I’d tired of Makoto’s silly little girl antics.
You can see that Hosoda tries to focus on the big emotional scenes — there’s at least two instances where Makoto breaks down, sobbing loudly, huge globular tears dripping from her cheeks. When I first watched this film a decade ago, I remember my wife snorting in derision at these scenes, probably not the intended effect. His later movies become much more adept at wringing powerful emotion from his not-so-cerebral plots. The movie’s climax, with Makoto racing to prevent inevitable catastrophe is very effective in eliciting a sense of panic and dread, and is definitely a highlight worth watching until the end for.
In terms of presentation, the animation is much scratchier and looser than Hosoda’s later, very polished works. Characters in the middle distance tend to be depicted as very basic blobs without distinguishing features, which can seem a little jarring compared to the foreground characters with their distinctive Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Neon Genesis Evangelion) designs. Hosoda would go on to collaborate with Sadamoto again for his subsequent films Summer Wars and Wolf Children, and the scrappy charm of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’s animation evolves into something significantly slicker.
Even as the shortest of Hosoda’s movies, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time feels like it could have benefited from more judicious editing. The aforementioned introductory sequence is too slow, and my 10-year-old son was already bored before the plot really kicked off. The rest of the movie struggled to keep his attention, so I don’t think it works well as a children’s film, though there isn’t anything objectionable in it. The English dub is perfectly serviceable, produced by Ocean Production and a cast of Canadian voice actors doing their best to sound generic North American. This is one of the only anime movies I’ve never watched in the original Japanese. Now that I’ve seen it twice already in English, I have no desire to revisit it again. As a starting point when following Mamoru Hosoda’s career, it’s invaluable. As a movie, it’s fine I guess, but it’s probably my least favourite of all his films. It’s obvious why he became a director to watch, based on this, but he’s gone on to bigger and better things, some of which I hope to write about soon.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Directed by: Mamoru Hosoda
Screenplay by: Satoko Okudera
Based on: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time by Yasutaka Tsutsui
Character designer: Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Production studio: Madhouse
Japanese cinematic release: July 15th, 2006
UK DVD release: December 8th, 2008
UK blu-ray release: December 12th, 2011
Runtime: 98 minutes
BBFC rating: 12
