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Daylife the girl who leapt through time7/20/2023 ![]() ![]() The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is widely available on DVD and Blu-ray.Time of Eve was playing as part of the Scotland Loves Anime festival in Edinburgh, and my mother, brother and I watched it as part of a double bill with Lupin lll vs Conan. Your Name is currently doing a short run in theaters, so expect it to hit home ideo later this year. Know in advance that both films majorly get the waterworks going, though, so there’s really no such thing as a “palate cleanser” here.Įach is a modern anime classic that takes heavily from the Studio Ghibli tradition (the female-fronted The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in particular). Your Name, meanwhile, gets heady fast, its characters treading more serious territory - so if you’re planning a double feature, perhaps start with that one first and use The Girl Who Leapt Through Time as a bit of a palate cleanser. It’s what makes her trepidatious first steps toward love, responsibility and overall maturity so inspiring. Never once do we forget that Makoto is just a teenager. Your Name’s poetic exploration of love’s inscrutability is deeply affecting, as we’ve written about before so, too, is The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, maybe because it operates on a much smaller scale. These anime make for a tearjerking double-featureīoth movies beautifully portray just how extreme the teenage emotional landscape is in ways that remain endearing to any age. Yes, there’s the threat of mortal consequences, but the story is most immediately one of navigating awkward first crushes and recognizing the beauty of the life you do lead, warts and all. But The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’s drama is more intimate and universal than Your Name’s. That’s the other half that’s popular, that does well in school, that has time to do everything they want, making themselves happy and their parents proud. Makoto’s initial intentions mirror those of Your Name’s central pairing: She wants to see how the other half lives. (She uses them to try to stop a death from happening, too - The Girl Who Leapt Through Time does not stay away from the high drama of life-or-death situations, either.) But that also includes undoing events of more consequence, like when her best guy friend admits he likes her. Makoto is a lackadaisical student who by chance learns of her ability to “time-leap.” Naturally, she uses her clock-resetting powers to finally become a better student and live her best teenage life. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a sci-fi romantic comedy, after all. “More realistic” is a bit of a relative term here. While it’s a fitting climactic event for the drama of Your Name, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time succeeds by keeping its teenage feelings at the fore and more realistic in scope. We won’t spoil what, exactly, these events are, but rest assured: They have serious real-world consequences that go far beyond high schoolers wanting to be together. The love that Taki and Mitsuha quickly develop is all-encompassing and important to them on a global level that’s pretty par for the course for teens. These events are outsized in nature, but they fit perfectly with the anime’s tone. Your Name at first explores the awkwardness and pleasures of living as the opposite gender for a day, but the stakes of the heroes’ body swapping ramp up fairly quickly. ![]() It’s inexplicable throughout, but it’s the necessary setup for what becomes a series of cataclysmic events on a national scale. So, too, does the country-living girl Mitsuha in Taki’s. A boy named Taki, who lives in Tokyo, wakes up at random in the girl’s body. For as much as Your Name gets right, we might argue that The Girl Who Leapt Through Time did it first - and better.Įach film touches on similar themes: Young love! Understated sci-fi elements! Downer climactic moments! (We promise we won’t spoil what those entail.) In Your Name, a boy and a girl develop a strong bond through a bizarre, out-of-body experience they each share. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which likewise caused a storm at the Japanese box office in 2009, is another modern classic of Japanese animation. If that’s the case, they should look no further than The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, directed by Shinkai’s contemporary Mamoru Hosoda. Moviegoers who fall hard for the anime’s mix of humor and heart may come away wanting more after Your Name’s tearjerker of an ending. Your Name somehow balances all three of these disparate elements in less than two hours, and it does it well. It was a blockbuster in its home country, and rightfully so: The film is an emotional adventure of teen romance, tough choices and time travel. Your Name, directed by Makoto Shinkai, premiered in North American theaters over the weekend. The biggest anime since the genre-defining Spirited Away has come West. ![]()
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