Ani-Me #10: Falling With THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME (Patreon)

Welcome to Ani-Me! The Series Where You Make Me Watch Anime! To be clear, you aren’t making me do anything because I have enjoyed every bit of this so far. This week, we go back to watch a slightly earlier Hosoda feature. That’s right, it’s time for…

Today’s Entry: THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME (2006)

“Don’t do anything rash, Makoto.”

Hahahhahahaha, oh good granola, do I love Hosoda.

So far I’ve seen Summer Wars, Mirai, Wolf Children (which I want to rewatch for this series), and now The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and I’m just so dang smitten. It’s not just the utter focus on character interiority and his capacity for little funny moments - but the narrative playfulness where he slides in and out of these grand heady conceits with shocking ease. But the reason he gets away with it is because he stays so laser-focused on “what he’s saying” with the thematic thrust of it all, while never once betraying the character’s emotional state in the process.

With this film, I’m hard pressed to think of a character introduction I’ve enjoyed more in recent memory. Our first 20 minutes with Makoto Konno hit every necessary human note. To paint the counter-point, one of the reasons I have endless problems with “Save the Cat” is that the very central notion of the book’s title is so wrong, wrong, wrong. Giving your main character this generic “noble likability” for do-gooder-ism is a faulty aim in every sense, all because it makes the protagonist seem saintly. And NONE of us are saintly. Instead, we identify with faults. Which Makoto has plenty of and we get to watch as she clumsily stumbles through life, making funny excuses like, “sorry about the ruckus every morning.” And even showing herself as a delightfully unreliable narrator of her own carefree foibles: “that was an exception.” Hell, she’s so fucking funny throughout the entire film. The shots of her leaping and constantly falling into walls, the determined look on her face as she has the trash can on her head, and the casual eating of a giant sandwich are all burned into my brain. And I, like her, wanted to spending all my time languishing with her and her two dude friends, Chiaki and Kosuke, as they fuck around the baseball field. It’s such an amazing depiction of that time and space of impossible innocence that can only exist in the unsaid… and thus we hit our conceit…

The thing about time travel stories is that they are, more often than not, about the same things and use the same tricks. It’s usually some dire warning about how you can’t change fate and that to even try it is reckless and selfish (basically, you’re challenging the greek fates and please witness the grim results of characters that try to do that). Basically, time travel always creates more problems and realizing there’s things you can’t change, often making for metaphors about grief and regret. And so many time travel mysteries always come back to the realization, “it was ME who was that mysterious person who did that thing to myself before!” It’s as if time travel is always this invitation to be clever with the mechanisms, but chasing clever rarely lands you in the right spot. Especially if it makes your metaphors a little wonky. But while so many of the tropes make slight appearances, luckily, that is not the case with this film…

What I love about the “time waits for no one” mantra is that it means something very specific to this story’s context. Because she is absolutely making people wait for her and all her funny bullshit. She’s discovered the all-powerful ability to time travel and yet just ends up using it in that way that is incredibly myopic, if still innocent. Like going back to eat the last pudding, re-doing a pop quiz, or getting more time in a karaoke room. As Chiaki later says about her being the one to obtain this mystical power, “I’m relieved it was charged to an idiot”. But as is always the case with these things, it gets more complicated for her.

And it all starts with avoiding a conversation.

Makoto and Chiaki share a beautiful bike ride along the water as twilight gleams beyond them. But as Makoto muses on about Kosuke possibly dating Yuri, it just hits the point of inevitable response where… Chiaki admits he likes her, too and asks her out… But Makoto goes frozen. No, this isn’t a story about drawing necessary boundaries or the way boys often project onto the friends they love and the valid criticism of such behavior. No, this is about how she’s not ready to hear this… because she’s still in the endless summer.

The last point of carefree days before so much changes into adulthood. She wants to stay there. She wants things to be simple and carefree and in that space where no one really talks about what they feel. So she starts using her leaps to change the conversation, to try to avoid the topic, to soon avoid him all together, but somehow, someway, it always seems to come up. And soon all that avoidance leads to Chiaki dating her other friend, making her realize her own feelings in turn (yet another conversation she’s not ready for). No, her instinct to go back in time isn’t necessarily to fix things. It’s to keep things as they are. But soon there’s so much shifting and blaming and spiraling of things that actually DO need to be fixed. For some kind of consequence always rears its ugly head… in other words, the “time” always comes.

And in the process of realizing that, you only get so many chances to ignore or fix, before you have to fix yourself. This is actually the central metaphor of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, in that we all have a finite number of “leaps” we get in youth. That is the ability to chalk our mistakes up to innocence, or stave off a difficult conversation about the reality of others feelings, and more importantly, the reality of our own. Because things are always going to get impossibly real. And chances become things missed in a fleeting instance. Things seem like forever until one day they’re over. We only understand what a “chance” was in the rearview. And only we only get so many times to try and hold onto one in the moment.

The thing I love about The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is that it’s not really a “love story” (even though it kind of is). Nor is it REALLY about how there’s a person to share a magical connection with (even if they do). Nor is it really about waiting for that specific person in the future (even though that’s what happens). These things almost feel incidental to Makoto’s journey. Because for her, it’s about how hard it is to understand her own feelings, how hard it is to have conversation about them, and the power of telling people what you feel, no matter if it hurts them, or how vulnerable it makes you feel in the process. Heck, one of Makoto’s most triumphant moments are not in the grand coming together with the boy who also leapt through time, but the moment she was honest with her own friend about liking him, too. It’s so not about her finding love. It’s about the love that comes from finding her own own power to speak.

And yet, I love how much of the film is so beautifully unspoken. Whether it be the metaphysical nature of her “aunt witch” figure, the deep lore of the painting that was crafted “during a historical period of famine and war many centuries ago.” Or even the film’s treatment of time itself, first an ocean, then an impressionist painting, then the swirling mass of CGI wires. But perhaps the most affecting unspoken realization of all is the implication that Chiaki likely spent his last leap saving her life. But these powerful moments make all the more sense in a film that imagines the time travel not as the product of some whiz bang contraption, but a literal seed. A mere something to be planted in your mind, allowing for organic growth. And since time waits for no one, perhaps there is no better way to move forward…

… Than through growth.

<3HULK