The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
There was a point about halfway through The Girl Who Leapt Through Time where I thought it could rival the works of Makoto Shinkai, who I obviously respect a lot as a writer, where because of her actions, because of her emotional immaturity and inability to face her close friend when he tries to ask her out, Makoto, the eponymous protagonist inadvertently pushes him away, into the arms of her friend, at which point she realises she did actually want to be with him. Of course, since the film’s premise concerns a girl leaping through time, the ability which allowed her to sidestep his advances in the first place, equally allows her to fix her mistakes, otherwise the story might have expanded on the repercussions that avoiding difficult situations can have on the people around you.
To an extent, this is examined, in a way reminiscent of The Butterfly Effect, but with more restraint: all the changes Makoto affects are subtle and frivolous, first involving her leaping back in time to eat her pudding before her sister has a chance to steal it, or reversing time so she can spend another few hours singing karaoke with her friends, generally having a relatively small impact on the lives of people around her. The characterisation in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is strong as well, stronger than The Butterfly Effect, and at least as strong as The Place Promised in Our Early Days (although those comparisons might strike you, reader, as fairly arbitrary, I wish to convey that this is a far better film than The Butterfly Effect which, like Final Destination, has only the ephemeral merit of novelty to recommend it, and, unfortunately for Satoko Okudera and Yasutaka Tsutsui – the writers of the screenplay and original novel respectively – The Girl Who Leapt Through Time reminded me too much of Makoto Shinkai’s work to escape comparison).
Beyond the characterisation, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is well-scripted with some pitch-perfect timing, animation and cinematography. Apart from being an emotive story, it was also one of the funniest films I’ve seen in a while, managing to achieve some brilliant physical comedy without resorting to old anime tricks of super-deformation or cartoonish invulnerability, which works well in the film’s favour for the more serious moments when characters are in real danger. That is something that Shinkai’s work can’t claim at least (the comedy, not the anime tropes, since both are consistently realistic and minimally stylised, further inviting comparison): Shinkai’s work is generally melancholic throughout. But then, he has that down to a tee. There was never any really heart-wrenching moment in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, even with the inevitable parting at the end, none of those stand-out lines which Shinkai does so well, regardless of how convoluted his stories have to become to facilitate, or how unjustified they remain as a character monologues something like:
“Living alone, the nights seemed to last forever. When I couldn’t pass the time effectively, I went to a nearby train station and pretended to wait for someone.”
or
“The world I knew would betray me so many times from that day.”
Despite never quite scaling the peaks of emotional involvement I attribute to The Place Promised in Our Early Days and, to an extent, She and Her Cat and Voices of a Distant Star, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is an all-round well-made movie: well-characterised, well designed and animated – both the characters and the environments, and well-scripted, even if the gratuitous time-leaping and consequentially inevitable repetition threaten to bloat it, except for one point which bugs me a little: (I’ll try not to spoil it for anyone who plans to go and watch the film after this, though would appreciate suggestions from anyone who has seen the film… comment boxes are down there somewhere V ) at the end Makoto and her friend are separated by time, just as you think they might hook up, and he says “I’ll be waiting for you,” as if it’s all just fine, they’ll meet up and get it on, but if he’s gone to the future, then, depending on when it is, and since she has no way of getting there except to wait, she’ll be much older than him, so it’s not going to work. So what’s going on there? What’s he on about he’ll be waiting for her? It’s like the film could have had a happy ending where they get together and stay together, or there could have been bittersweet parting, but instead it’s like false optimism, like their revelation is that they can get together, but just not yet, but they can’t. It kind of left me without a sense of closure because we’ve followed Makoto on this journey into emotional maturity and yet there’s no tangible reward at the end, except maybe she found some direction in her life about what she wants to do, in which case her parting with her friend seems to misdirect the ending’s focus.
(P.S. I just realised that both the female protagonist of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Shinkai-san share the same first name. How odd.)
Tags: Anime, Final Destination, long sentences, Makoto Shinkai, Relationships, repercussions, She and Her Cat, The Butterfly Effect, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, time-travel, Voices of a Distant Star
September 4th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Hey Henry,
I’ll get the negatives out of the way first: I think you’re right to be concerned about the sentence lengths. You’ve made some very good points and I agree witha lot of what you’ve said but creative and critical writing are very different beasts – while wordy, convoluted sentences work perfectly well in a story, an article like this needs to be more concise in order to be effective.
Anway, my two cents: I really enjoyed the film when I saw it a few months back, though I wouldn’t put it up there with the likes of Miyazaki and the rest of the Studio Ghibli lot. I absolutely loved the first two-thirds for most of the reasons you pointed out – characterization, scripting, humour etc. When Makoto was travelling through time without any concern for how she recieved the ability, just for sorting out the various troubles in her life, I thought it was brilliant.
But then, in the final third, the writers decided to try and explain the cause of it. This is where I think the movie falls apart. I’d have preferred it if they’d gone down Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day route; Ramis didn’t explain why the worst day of Bill Murray’s life was repeating itself, he just had it stop happening once Bill stopped being such a conceited git and convinced Andie Mcdowell to fall for him. By ditching the original script’s idea of a jealous former lover casting a voodoo spell causing the events to happen, it placed focus on the far more intriguing premise of how Bill reacts to what is happening to him.
I understand that that isn’t a perfect comparison to make: Bill’s predicament is involuntary and seems like a punishment and it is therefore easier to resolve the story without going into techinicalities like why this is happening. Makoto, on the other hand, learns to control the time-jumps and it certainly isn’t a punishment, so the story isn’t forced to revolve around the phenomenon as she can simply choose not to jump.
On the other hand, I would’ve preferred it if the filmmakers HAD left the film with some ambiguity, letting the focus remain on Makoto’s time-leaping, rather than give it the explanation they did. It makes the movie switch from an easygoing, charming fantasy to an overelaborate, hammed up sci-fi romance with umpteen Lord of the Rings-style false endings and a final line from Chiaki to Makoto that I’m guessing was intended to add a hint of hope to what would have been a downbeat, unhappy ending but is absolutely baffling (like you said, surely, in Chiaki’s time, Makoto is long dead?). It feels like a copout. I just wish the writers had shown a little restraint, rather than let their ambitions get the best of them like I think happened here.
Simple high-school dramas being solved through with the assisstance of time travel may sound like something out of a bad children’s TV serial, but when done as well as the first half of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time it is infinitely more appealing than the overcomplicated schmaltz of the second half.
Also, I may be nitpicking on this last note but I didn’t like the unexplained lucky coincidence that gave Makoto her time-leaping ability back at the last minute:”Once my time-travelling MacGuffin runs out of energy, that is it, no more time travelling, I’m stuck here. No second chances. None at all… Well, except if somebody else freezes time around me and this somehow gives me a bonus leap, but the writers aren’t going to explain how that works.”
September 4th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I like the way it explains how she got her time-leaping power, it makes the rest more plausible within the fiction, and I don’t think it ever got too sci-fi. It certainly sticks more to reality and plausibility than The Place Promised in Our Early Days, yet both remain resolutely focused on the human drama.
Sometimes leaving ambiguity works well, like in Cube or Cloverfield, but generally, and perhaps this is a rather geeky preference, I like things to be explained, even if the explanation is of dubious credibility. For example, what elevated Mass Effect to a great game universe, was not that it was all full of pew-pew lasers but that everything was explained, from how the ships could travel faster than light (the mass relays create a mass effect field around the ships, reducing their mass to zero, allowing them to pass the light-barrier) to how the guns never run out of ammo (a tiny piece is shorn from a block of metal and fired each time, allowing thousands of rounds to be fired.)
It kind of makes sense about their going back in time restoring each other’s time-leaps, because if he went back to before she used her last time-leap, then she never used it and so has it left, though it is never explained how Chiaki freezes time if his energy was used up.