In the early 2000s, director Mamoru Hosoda stood at a difficult crossroads concerning his career in the ever-turbulent anime industry. Having recently withdrawn from his dream job working for anime giant Studio Ghibli as the prospective director for Howl’s Moving Castle over creative differences and compromises to his vision, the director found himself back at Toei Animation where he had been throughout the previous decade working on lucrative and popular franchises such as Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, and Digimon. He was essentially back where he started but with a desire to write and direct original, personal stories that put him in contention with an industry fixated on pumping out franchise entries and manga adaptations. Thus, Hosoda decided to take a leap of faith. Joining Madhouse in 2005, he started production on The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a simple coming-of-age film that would establish the once journeyman director as one of the few anime auteurs recognizable worldwide.
Essentially a reworking of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s beloved science-fiction novel that had previously been adapted by Nobuhiko Obayashi, Hosoda’s film follows 17-year-old consummate layabout Makoto Konno who always seems to find the precious time of her youth slipping through her fingertips. Finding herself at the edges of adulthood in her last year of high school, she spends her days idling away with best friends Kosuke and Chiaki in the quietude of what could be their last summer together while her classmates stress over college entrance exams and other concerns pertaining to their futures. After a serendipitous accident involving her bicycle colliding with a speeding train is inexplicably undone, Makoto discovers she can “time-leap” whenever she physically propels her body through the air at significant speeds.
With the power to bend the fabric of reality to her whim, Makoto uses this transcendent ability with a frivolity befitting a naive teenager. She leaps to ace a pop quiz she flunked, to redo a karaoke session with her friends repeatedly, to avoid an awkward confession of love from a classmate. Through the tomboyish charms and compelling geniality of Makoto’s character, we wind up empathizing with her flippant abuse of her power rather than condemning her as she repeats the same couple of days over and over again. At a critical junction in her short life when her effervescent teenage years are waning, she twists the very flow of time only to simply savor those carefree moments while she still can. That universally felt anxiety over life’s difficult transitions central to the coming-of-age genre is expressed through Makoto’s commendable attempt to literally conquer the passing of time so that no moment can ever be called wasted.
Surprisingly for a “time travel” film, the usual scrutiny over timelines and event order never factors into the serene tones of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Sutured into Makoto’s myopic worldview, the concern over how many times she repeats the same days or how unkempt the order of events gets never enters the film’s purview so long as she herself is reveling in the recurrence. If anything, the manner in which the film blends time and repeats whole sequences with slight variations due to Makoto’s time-leaping assists in giving the film a tranquil vibe evocative of the summers of bygone youth. The film puts forward that the concern over time passing is something we develop with age. It treats its timeline with a serene aloofness because Makoto, due to the innocence of her age, does as well.
Of course, Makoto’s multiple hops through the timestream prove to be ultimately futile in deferring the process of growing up. This harsh lesson for all coming-of-age protagonists comes to her when she realizes her flippant toying with time only serves to delay the inevitable rather than overcome it completely, and that molding events to her design has adverse effects on others her immaturity left her blind to. The cost of this moral is great for Makoto, altering her life in a way that cannot be undone even with the ability to jump back to a better time and arrange things to her whim. You cannot live life to the fullest by repeatedly going backward, however, and that’s why the film’s bittersweet ending ultimately leans more on the sweet side. With a new sense of perspective and a newfound appreciation for how “Time Waits for No One,” a mantra she regularly repeated throughout the film despite never understanding its meaning, Makoto’s brief flirtation with space-time manipulation teaches her how precious the thing she had been playing with is.
Hosoda has said what possessed him to leave his previous positions at established anime production companies was a desire to produce original and personal stories. In the 15 years since he left Toei animation, he has made good on that goal and in one way or another his life and experiences have been weaved through his films despite their fantastical premises and abundance of imagination. The achingly maternal Wolf Children (2012) was born directly out of Hosoda’s own grief over the recent passing of his mother. The touching master-student relationship in The Boy and the Beast (2015) was inspired by the director’s own personal anxieties about becoming a father for the first time. His latest film Mirai (2018) and its central sibling rivalry drew inspiration from Hosoda’s family growing, even going as far as to use his own children as the models for the film’s main characters.
Though the frivolous exploits of a time-traveling teenager might not seem as personal as his later work, his first original film nevertheless speaks to the state of the director’s career at the time of its release back in 2006. Knowing he could not get the most out of his life by going backward (in this case to the studio he had been at the previous decade) the director took a leap of faith with Madhouse and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and today he has established his own animation studio and has been frequently considered as one of few directors to be dubbed “next Miyazaki,” i.e., the one who replaced him as director on Howl’s Moving Castle. No doubt what made the film personal to Hosoda back in 2005 is what has allowed the film to resonate with new generations 15 years on: the sobering reminder that our time on this earth is precious and that we can only truly live it to its fullest by moving forward, not back. We can savour the moments while they are here, but inevitably we all have to leap.
