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.)

So what are the stories told in this collection? Well, there’s the expected stuff: a back story to the events that lead up to the creation of the fictional Matrix and a fleshing out of an event mentioned within the films (the final flight of one of the ships, previously mentioned but not shown, that had been destroyed) and then there are some quirky little narratives based on single concepts such as ‘what if there was a glitch in the matrix that altered the properties of objects in a certain area?’ or ‘what if someone pushed themselves to the limit and caught a glimpse of outside the matrix?’

What all these stories do is demonstrate the possibility for rich ideas within the concept of the Matrix, which is more than I can say for the actual Matrix trilogy. Honestly, I never watched past halfway in the third film, and I found the second one to be as dire as the first one, after the novelty of ‘bullet-time’ had worn off. I think the main problem with the films was characterisation, it was all just posing and running through set-pieces, without adding any depth to the characters. Really, I just didn’t care about any of them. But, like I say, there were some good ideas in The Matrix and, even if it did lean towards the pretentious, some of the concepts and minor characters (the oracle, the architect, the keymaker) were, potentially, pretty cool.

Where, I think, the Animatrix’s strength really lies is in its variety: we’re not spending five-and-a-half hours watching Keanu Reeves walk around and pose in a leather trench-coat and sunglasses. Instead, we’re being presented with concise, engaging narratives. The Animatrix is successful too in turning cliché into homage. Where the Matrix took the slow-motion bullet effects and unlikely hero turned expert fighter/shooter/hero and fell into the dirge of action movie conventionality, the Animatrix, in one story, takes film noire cliché (the jaded, hat-and-trench-coat New York private eye) adds a steam-punk flavour and grainy black-and-white aesthetic and creates an fresh-feeling story. This is not just isolated to a single story in the collection, however, for a similar technique is used on another, this time taking the conventions of anime. At first, it seems a generic feudal Japan piece, with all the big-hair, impossible swordplay cliché of the style, but then the Matrix simulation element kicks in, allowing the scenery to cycle seamlessly between locations, and suddenly, rather than a rehashing of the anime style, it becomes an exercise in style. Yes, everything in this particular story you will have seen before, but when it’s done this stylishly, you won’t really care.

The animation is, of course, where this collection really needs to shine and, for the most part, it does. The CGI at worst is serviceable and at best, while not matching up to something like Advent Children, can be quite pretty. Most of the collection, however, is traditional animation, and some of it is very nice indeed. My favourite of this animation comes in the films entitled Kid’s Story and World Record in both of these distortion and caricaturing of the body in motion really helps to add a sense of movement to the characters and creates a distinctive visual style.

One final note to make, if I still haven’t interested you in this fairly unique film collection, is that it’s incredibly cheap: I bought my copy a couple of years ago from HMV for £3, and that included a pretty decent soundtrack CD in the case. Recently however, I’ve seen it for just £1, albeit without the soundtrack CD. And if that’s a little costly for you, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to find out on Youtube or somewhere.

Take animé for example. I used to love animé: It was the first section I went to in DVD shops, I bought all the Studio Ghibli films, and I watched countless series and movies. But now I just don’t get so excited by all the visual bombast, by all the surreality or the squiggly little symbols. There’s a lot of cliché in anime films, perhaps no more than in any genre, say film noire, or romance, but the weird-for-weird’s sake, or the cool-for-cool’s sake of anime isn’t doing it for me any more.

Now that’s not to say I can’t appreciate the artistic vision in some of the better animes. The Place Promised in Our Early Days(Beyond the Clouds in America) is still, despite its conceit that two fifteen year old boys would be able to single-handedly build and program a high-tech aeroplane, or its obscure plot about a girl in a coma who will cause the world to end if she wakes and stops dreaming, a beautiful dramatic work. The themes of friendship and longing are convincingly and delicately portrayed.

Similarly, the Studio Ghibli films are amongst the greatest animated stories in the world. True, few of them are original stories, but each one has a trademark charm and style imbued only by Hayao Miyazake’s team. What makes them stand out for me, apart from the wonderfully organic animated movement, is the way that, unlike a lot of Disney films, there is almost never an irredeemably evil villain in the Ghibli films. Take the witch Yubaba in Spirited Away for example. She’s the primary antagonist, and she’s pretty mean sometimes, but she’s never the evil queen of Snow White; and she is given just as much character development over the course of the movie as any of the ‘good’ characters, with scenes showing her caring for and spoiling her gigantic baby, and others showing her develop a sense of respect for the hard-working Chihiro, who she initially imprisons in her bathhouse.

Similarly, in Princess Mononoke, the first Studio Ghibli film to be translated and widely distributed outside of Japan, we have humans destroying a forest to sustain their town, and we have the inhabitants of the forest fighting back against the humans. Although the conflict is evidently highly destructive, the viewer is never given the impression that anyone is acting out of malice, or anything less than necessity. It would have been easy for the makers to say that the humans were wrong and evil for cutting back the forest, as in the eco-film Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest, but instead the film shows why the humans have to cut away the trees, and why the forest has to fight back. The message ultimately is the same caution against environmental destruction as Fern Gully’s, but in Mononoke we are given additional viewpoints.

These are the exceptions to the rule however. A lot of animé, while not lacking in charm, is largely generic, focusing on spectacle over realism, cheap visual comedy over narrative depth. Perhaps I’m being a little too hard on the genre here; all that certainly has its place, and I’ve laughed as hard at any Love Hina episode as I have at any episode of Fawlty Towers or The Office, and thought has hard about any concept in Neon Genesis Evangelion as I have at.. well, honestly, I can’t think of a comparison for that series, yes, it was deliberately arcane and had an over-abundance of Christian and other religious iconography thrown in almost at random to create intrigue (I suppose the closest comparison in that sense would be something like Lost), but as a study in troubled adolescence under pressure (namely the animé staple of saving the world), it is only vaguely paralleled by something like Donnie Darko.

I suppose that my main problem I’m having with animé, among the rest of Japan’s cultural exports, is that it seems to just be being blindly lapped up along with anything vaguely oriental, or cute (kawaii) in a Japanese way: Things like J-rock and Hello Kitty, as well as Manga and Asian horror films. Having been into animé for at least six years, and primarily Japanese videogames before that, as well as in the last couple of years getting to know more and more people with what I’ve recently learned can be termed ‘yellow fever’, I feel that perhaps I have reached saturation point with the whole thing and just need a break.

Another contributing factor could be the lack of decent Japanese videogames I’ve played lately. I think the last good, original game from the land of the rising soon I played was Grasshopper Studio’s No More Heroes, which even then was a deliberate parody of Japanese animé culture. Otherwise I’ve been playing some very good American games on Xbox 360 and the few Japanese games I’ve played have all been Wii sequels to established Nintendo franchises. Strange when, until recently, I idolised Nintendo as the purveyors of the finest quality games in the world, but since the string of brilliant Western developed games like Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto IV, Portal and Call of Duty 4, my eyes have really been opened to the potential of the rest of the world’s games industry.

Still, with their penchant for the visually intriguing and inexhaustible stream of quirky concepts, the Japanese might warm me again to their culture. Either that or time and nostalgia will bring me back to the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai and Hideaki Anno.