| Dan McCabe |
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, November 9th, through Tuesday, November 11th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Time travel is a fantasy. While time travel stories often get lumped in with science fiction, there’s not much “science” behind it. While general relativity and time dilation theories support the possibility of moving forward in time, backwards time travel has about as much scientific support as ghosts and ghouls. Nonetheless, it is often presented on-screen with the trappings of pseudo-science, like the “flux capacitor” in Back to the Future (1985). Sometimes, like in Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983), film presents the concept of time travel as purely supernatural.
By the way, here’s your customary “spoiler warning.” One day, I’m going to write an article about why I don’t think spoiler warnings are always needed for older films. That said, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is not readily available outside of Japan, not even on streaming. I only found a grainy YouTube version. There are likely many of you who have not seen it, although some may be familiar with the more easily accessible anime version from 2006.
Most of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time takes place in a school and the surrounding neighborhood, with two important exceptions: the opening ski scene and the later cliffside scene.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a 1960s Japanese novel that has been adapted for the screen five times, beginning with Ôbayashi’s 1983 version. Every variation of the story has the same general plot: a Japanese teenage girl starts experiencing time jumps, and has to determine what to do with them. Each iteration of the story has its differences. For example, in some versions of the story, the protagonist can control the jumps from the beginning (like the 2006 anime version), in others she cannot (such as the 1983 version).
Ôbayashi’s film opens with a dreamy scene at a ski resort. Our protagonist, Kazuko, played by Tomoya Harada (a J-Pop superstar before that became a term of art in the West), gazes up at the stars, daydreaming about the night sky sending a boyfriend to come to her side. Her friend, Goro (Toshinori Omi) responds that the stars are nothing but burning balls of gas and they can’t grant her wish. She’s being a little childish, but what teenager hasn’t looked up to the night sky with youthful, even silly dreams? This makes Kazuko immediately relatable, which had to be especially important to Japanese audiences seeing a well-known pop star play a “normal” teenager.
The opening, black and white, ski resort scene promises the audience that The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is no ordinary teen movie.
Viewing the film this past week, I became interested in how much it leans into what would become the trappings of Western teen movies in the 1980s and 1990s. There’s the lovelorn, female protagonist played by a recognizable actress; Goro, the loyal, platonic male friend; and Fukamachi (Ryōichi Takayanagi) the mysterious, handsome love interest with a bizarre secret. There are helpful teachers, busy classrooms, and eventful walks to school. Most of all, there are those quiet moments teenagers spend with one another—the ones that only exist to adults in the sepia-toned memories of their youth.
The opening scene at the ski resort could open many ordinary teen movies. But your standard high-school romance typically doesn’t involve time travel. Sure, Back to the Future (1985) is a teen movie, but that is a rare exception. Nor does the typical Western teen movie play with color palates to contrast between dreamlike sequences and reality like Ôbayashi’s does, giving the viewer a transient view of time and space.
Of course, what separates Ôbayashi’s film from the straightforward tales of say, John Hughes, is the void between the expected life of a Japanese teenager and the supernatural powers that sweep Kazuko away. Her classroom lessons, a round of archery practice, even an earthquake turn and skip in and out of focus. Something seems terribly wrong, but Kazuko doesn’t figure it out until the next day. She experiences the exact same lessons, archery practice, and earthquake as part of the exact same day, unsure of what is happening to her. She thinks she’s losing it, even commenting to Fukamachi that she’s behaving strangely.
The cliffside scene late in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time abruptly pulls the audience out of the main setting. We don’t know if this scene takes place in the present or the distant future, nor are we supposed to.
The film plays fast and loose with time and space, building to a crescendo at the end. At that point, Kazuko and Fukamachi meet at a cliffside by the ocean. Ôbayashi gives no indication of where, or when, this meeting occurs. It could be the distant future, it could be Kazuko’s present. In some ways, it doesn’t matter. The scene stands apart from most of the film, which mostly takes place in a suburban setting. It is here that Kazuko learns how to control the time jumps.
With the exception of a few “spinning void with random clocks” scenes (perhaps an unwitting homage to Mr. Peabody segments of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show), most of the film takes place in Kazuko’s school, home, or her small neighborhood. Without the ski trip and ocean scenes that bookend the film, it would have a contained feel to it. That would break our suspension of disbelief because the scenes away from the town expand the visual scope of the film. It scales up the world to create a setting large enough to encompass a time travel fantasy. If we remained in the teen movie setting for too long, the reveal at the end would play as absurd. Instead, we have seen a broader world, and film’s ending fits into that world.
The main reason that Ôbayashi’s film works is that it embraces the fantastical. There’s no Delorean or other contraption causing the time travel. Except for the vague reference to ecological decay, there are no trappings of science fiction at all. Instead, you have Ôbayashi taking the teen movie and breaking it to show something few other time travel films depict: a time travel of longing. Fukamachi, you see, is not Fukamachi at all, but a teenager from the future who has taken the place of the real Fukamachi, a boy who died in a car accident years earlier.
When Kazuko travels through time, Ôbayashi places her in front of various backdrops, such as this crashing wave.
It’s tragic, but brushed aside. The film is far too interested in Kazuko who continues to long for the Fukamachi she knew, even after he has erased her memory of their meeting. When she sees the time traveler again at the end of the film, she recognizes him but doesn’t seem to know why. She can’t escape the feelings she had for him, feelings she no longer remembers. Nonetheless, the grown-up Kazuko cannot move on from the encounter.
I think the difference between films like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and time travel adventure movies like Back to the Future is that the former films focus so much on one person’s experience with a fantastic, mind-altering phenomenon; the latter uses time travel as a plot element. Sure, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a little disoriented when he ends up in 1955, but he’s not questioning his sanity like Kazuko does through half of her film. Overall, it’s a fascinating take on the idea, and one you can check out at the Trylon from November 9 through November 11.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon