TokiKake: Wow, what a trip!

I just finished watching “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” (Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo), a movie I had been wanting to see but hadn’t gotten around it until tonight because a friend bringing it up a couple days ago reminded me about it. TokiKake was a very touching film – made me cry a couple times. My brain is still trying to think about deeper meanings while my hands are typing this so I’m not going to attempt a detailed analysis. (Besides, that would spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, right?)

I went into it knowing only that time travel was involved somehow and not much else. While that was a main component of the plot, what was more interesting was the change that occured within Makoto, the protagonist. A normally lucky girl, she has an abnormally unlucky day that would have ended in a deadly fashion until she unconsciously (and physically) jumps slightly back in time to safety. Her fortune gradually changes from almost dying in a train accident to feeling on top of the world within 15 “screen minutes”. She enjoys her newfound but limited ability by serving herself but then sees her selfishness has made things worse for the people around her. Her earnest attempts to fix her own mistakes make the situation worse until she feels helpless to do anything about it.

Near the end of the film, when everything is back to normal, everyone but Makoto is happy. She wonders why she even tried in the first place. She does gets lifted back up emotionally soon after then and the movie ends on a relatively happy note. That one moment, though, was one of the most depressing things I have ever seen/felt, forming the lowest valley on the emotional trip I took while watching the film. As for Makoto, she overcomes her fear of uncomfortable events and realizes that she has to take the bad times along with the good.

The characters in the film come off naturally and the explanations of the time jump make sense albeit after a seemingly deus ex machina event (or plot twist, if you wish) that leads off the third act. The idea of going back and doing something differently has surely cropped up in everyone’s heads at least once in their life but then if you were asked who would have to suffer in order for you to get your way, the once head-in-the-clouds idea falls to the earth when their sense of reality and moral responsibility hits. The fact that the activity which tied Makoto and her two friends together was playing baseball after school made me like the film more as a fan of the sport.

I definitely recommend this to anyone who has a chance to see it. The movie is actually a sequel of the original novel, in which Makoto’s aunt was the protagonist, and I would really like to read that to learn the backstory.

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