t would you do if you could "leap" backward through time? When tomboyish 17 year old Makoto Konno gains this ability after an accident in her high school chemistry lab, she immediately sets about improving her grades and preventing personal mishaps. Before long, however, she realises that even innocuous changes can have terrible consequences. Changing the past is not as simple as it seems, and eventually Makoto will have to rely on her new powers to shape the future for herself and her friends.
I wasn't entirely sure what to expect with this film; with a title like "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" it inspires intrigue into what it might be about and how she might be able to leap through time. The first thing that springs to mind is Quantum Leap's Sam Beckett who could leap through time into other people's bodies so he could right past wrongs through the result of an experiment gone wrong (although it was later suggested that he was leaping because he wanted to be able to). In the case of Makoto she gets her ability to leap through time through a object that looks like it's a walnut and at first she uses her newly found powers to "fix" her own life.
The story was first published as a novel in 1976 and has since inspired a number of movies for cinema and TV release, and a recent manga series so it's a story the eastern audience should know quite well. This new animated version was released in Japan in 2006, but now (in 2008) it has only just reached British shores.
The film starts with Makoto experiencing a bad day - she's late for school, she does badly on an exam, gets crushed under a few people when they trip over, and then falls over in the science lab; but that is where her life changes. On the way home from school Makoto dies, at least she should have done, when she is thrown from her bike in front of a train she "time-leaps" back a few minutes which stops her from dying that day. At this time she's unsure of what has happened - as anybody would likely to be if such a thing happened to them. As she finds out about her newfound abilities and starts to practice she goes back to the start of the day and fixes everything that went wrong - but at the cost of other people. When her good friend, This isn't something she realises until a student is bullied and starts to snap back. Then when Chiaki, her best friend, asks her out she keeps leaping backwards through time to just before he asked her in hope that he wouldn't - she wanted their friendship to stay the same. After a while she finds more she wants to fix that went wrong with other people's lives after she started her leaping, though eventually she notices that there is a number which counts down each time she leaps - meaning she doesn't have many more leaps left. By the end of the film she has a new understanding of life, and she becomes a better person for her experiences - which is a pretty typical message for an anime film (with such messages being mirrored in great films such as Sprited Away).
The style of the animation is more or less as you would expect it to be, but the attention to details in some scenes is really good. One such example is in the science lab when you see the chalk board, the chalk actually makes the same textures on the board as a real one would. The soundtrack isn't anything special, but I think despite this it is still worth watching just for the story, and the humour.
