The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
by
, 02-02-11 at 11:34 PM (1589 Views)
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I'm not going to lie, but I haven't been an avid anime fan for a long time. I guess the big thing is, I either outgrew it or there just isn't anything interesting out there to watch. Now and then, I do watch the occasional movie or two out of curiosity or absolute interest. "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" is one of those titles that hit both points and it was actually kind of an impulse buy a day or two before I was made an Admin on A4.
I figured, you know, I haven't watched anime in a while, I mind as well try getting back into it if I'm going to be an Administrator of an "Anime Forums". Hilariously, I didn't follow through and I probably watch a max of 2 series/movies a year.
Just to say, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time will henceforth, be abbreviated to "TGWLTT".
TGWLTT is a beautiful movie about a girl named Makoto who spends her days hanging out with her friends, Chiaki and Kousuke. Whether it be baseball or karaoke, she lives carefree and enjoying her life which includes not studying, waking up late and never having time to eat breakfast.
One day, Makoto inadvertently gains the ability to "time-leap". Instead of using this new found ability to benefit her monetarily or to take over the world and any other insane premise you can think of, she uses it lightheartedly like having more time to spend in Karaoke or going back in time to eat her favorite foods. She even time leaps to get more time to sleep.
What TGWLTT does really well is it keeps the story in a modern-fantasy about a carefree girl who is enjoying life. There is little violence to be had and it suits the movie really well. It's easy to keep up with and it's hard to not fall in love with the characters because they're generally very likable.
The artwork also takes a simple approach. The character details are kept clean and they animate smoothly. If you watch a lot of anime, you can sometimes notice reused frames and that it may be a little hard to watch because the framerate is so low. TGWLTT does an extremely good job with animation. It's silky smooth and it's hard to fault the movie on it because there isn't much to fault it on. The simplicity lends itself well to the story.
The music is pretty subtle. When there is a BGM to listen to, it matches what is going on the screen and it definitely works out to the movie's benefit and it also helps a lot of the narrative since it's less distracting, which makes the characters much more powerful.
I've watched the movie in both Japanese and English and I have to say, I'm very impressed by the English voice actors. You can actually watch this movie in English and have very little to complain about because they're fantastic. Each of the voices matches up to their character and what actually helped the movie a lot too is that there are very few instances where the focus is on a character's face, which limits a voice actor's need to voice sync.
The biggest problem with a lot of anime is that it focuses on the lip syncing animation, which causes a lot of English to be choppy. This isn't the case here and the voice actors have free reign to express themselves the way they should be expressed. So feel free to watch it in English if you don't want to read subtitles because it's quite worth it.
There is only one complaint though, in the localization, and that they do translate certain things too literally. An example of this is Makoto's aunt Yoko. They actually translated the name to "Witch". I'm fairly certain that this is more on the laziness on the translator, but the name shouldn't have been translated so literally... especially when Makoto spends her time saying very Japanese-like names and food such as Tampanyaki.
Overall, "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" is a great movie that is worth watching and I highly recommend anyone who is into some romance and silly modern adventures, this is a must watch.