Monday, 30 June 2025

From the archive: "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"


Delicate, becalmed and emotionally satisfying, Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda's animation The Girl Who Leapt Through Time forms a welcome antidote to the noisy, smirking banalities of Jumper. After an incident in a chemistry lab, klutzy schoolgirl Makoto (voiced by Riisa Naka) discovers she can stop and reverse the clock by means of a running jump, thus literally leaping through time. Rather than save the world, Makoto applies herself to accomplishing the kind of things an ordinary girl in her late teens might consider cool: landing top marks in her exams, eking out extra minutes in the karaoke lounge, getting the tea she wants, rather than that she's originally served. Yet the main business of the plot is a chain of events caused by her embarrassed rebuffing of a friend who asked her out, from which our heroine learns that direct intervention in the lives of others, leaping in feet first, has as many negative as positive effects. 
It's very sweet that that the film should use a superpower to resolve a series of crushes: actions that might very well mean the world to the parties involved, though which turn out to have further-reaching consequences than first imagined. Visually, Hosoda takes his cue from a painting the girl's aunt is restoring, and which proves crucial to the plot ("the longer you look at it, the more relaxed and comforted you get"); even when Makoto is at her most agitated, this dreamiest of cameras will often drift away to observe a cloud formation or a ladybird making its way across a surface. It's a time-travel movie that allows itself, and its audience, precious moments in which to breathe, think and reflect upon the various ways in which time flies.

(May 2009)

A 4K restoration of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time opens in selected cinemas from Sunday.

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