Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo - Time wouldn’t be so much a predator, if you could leap from time to time.

I had been planning to watch Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) for a couple of weeks. To be honest it was the name of the movie alone that drew me to it. I watched the first few minutes of it a week ago, but I was caught up in some other activity that I do not recall, which made me put off watching the show for a while. I finally got around to sitting down for roughly ninety minutes in order to watch the movie.

I don’t watch many feature length anime. This has to do with both availability and time. It is a lot easier to sit for twenty or thirty minutes indulging in a little procrastination while not feeling too bad for the experience than it is to sit for ninety.

For that matter, there is only one reason that I actually managed to watch the entire show. I have plenty of things that I should be doing, given that school is about to start again soon. However, the movie starts out showing the main character Makoto who is plainly a fun character in general.

I’m not too concerned with the technical merits of the voice acting. I’m not speaking for the character design either, which seem to be rather ordinary. The animation quality was impressive. That did not sway my opinion very much as I have come to expect better quality in feature length anime. I simply liked this character. She was fun straight forward and easy to grasp. Those are not necessarily adjectives that I would generally give as positive attributes. In the context of the story it was exactly what was needed. She gains an incredible power that allows her to leap through time, and she uses it to achieve relatively mundane tasks.

Watching her realize that she had the power to fly back in time then seeing what she did with it was done perfectly as far as animation and story telling go. We could see her mind working as she comprehended the situation. We could also see how she totally missed the incredible depth and vast potential she had at her disposal.

What I liked the most was exactly that she did not use her time leaping ability to save the world or change the destiny of all man kind. Her outlook was entirely superficial at first. At its peak it only extended to her friends at school. She was in ever sense of the word a “kid” about the whole thing.

The movie had its less light moments. They worked in a little drama and romance toward the end of the movie. The message, “time waits for no one” seemed to be appropriate. Throughout the movie Makoto tried to change aspects of event to get a desired goal. There just was no way for her to create the perfect history. It would seem fate was the real message.

I would have really liked to take this post on some type of emotional diatribe about how time can both heal and cause great distress. It just doesn’t jive with the movie. I simply wasn’t too moved by it. Please do not misunderstand me on that last comment I thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

My one thought while watching Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo wasn’t about time travel or changing fate. I couldn’t seem to shake the thought that I would really like to see a show based on Makoto just being Makoto all day and nothing more.

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About the person in the lab room: I think it was Makoto who was in the lab and pushed herself.

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