Title: Time Traveller aka The Girl who Leapt Through Time aka Toki o Kakeru Shoujo
Genre: Drama
Director: Taniguchi Masaaki
Format: Movie; 120 minutes.
Date: 13 Mar 2010

Synopsis: Yoshiyama Kazuko is a pharmaceutical researcher who has just discovered a breakthrough: she has concocted a serum that enables time traveling. She receives an old letter with a lavender inside and, as she begins to recall lost memories, gets into a car accident. As her daughter Akari sits by her mother’s bedside, Kazuko wakes up and tells her to send a message to a man named Fukamachi Kazuo. In order to find Kazuo, Akari needs to go to her mom’s lab and consume the serum. Following her mother’s desperate request, Akari embarks on her journey back in time: April 1972.

The Highlights
Premises: Hackneyed lost love; poorly utilized sci-fi elements.
Romance: Relationship between Akari and Ryota is sweet, but too typical in J-movies.
Plot development: Hasty first half-hour; climatic resolution is unsatisfying.
Time-traveling: Inconsistently defined; story tripped over its own theme.

Time Traveller claims to be the alternative retelling of TokiKake, the anime movie that impressed me with its charming cast and sentimental storyline. Although this movie will inevitably be compared one way or another to the animated adaptation of the original novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka, every movie deserves to be judged on its own merits. Not surprisingly, Time Traveller does not deviate from the formula used in Japanese movies as of late by adapting the novel in the form of a dramatic teenage love story. As one who has a soft spot for dramas, I feel disappointed that this movie fails to stand out from other Japanese drama movies, even if it has sci-fi elements supporting the overarching love story.

The movie starts off on the wrong foot; the plot development and setup for the first half-hour is unnecessarily hasty. There isn’t enough emphasis given to the characterization of the protagonist, Akari, and her mother, Kazuko. Its progression looks as though the movie wants to waste little time with the plot buildup, and instead, rush to the momentous scene where Akari travels back in time. As for the scene itself, Akari and Kazuko’s acting lacks credibility and realism, especially when Akari dashes off to fulfill her mother’s wish without any sensible skepticism or even sparing a second thought over the dubiousness of time-travel. It’s a lapse of judgment not by the character herself, but by the writers who did not flesh out the scene well enough, making it a major pitfall since that significant scene is the trigger that puts the story into motion.

Upon watching the movie, one would feel that, rather than being an alternative retelling of the classic novel, this is more like a Japanese drama version of Back to the Future: a tale of how changing past events inevitably influences the future. There is some creativity with the movie using time travel as the foundation for a love story, but it stumbles on its own theme when it is incoherent with the defined rules. Specifically, if the movie aims at showing why important past events should not be altered for the sake of protecting timelines, this element should have been enforced consistently throughout the whole movie and not simply slotted into the climatic portion as a convenient way to put an end to a case of love that was not meant to be.

While time travel is the theme of the movie, lost love is its motif, and it’s something very prevalent in the modern J-movie sphere. Japanese movies about teenage love – young, lost or unrequited – sprout so frequently these days that the only way for such a movie to stand out is to be different with its delivery and execution. Putting aside the inconsistent use of time travel, the motif is no different from any other Japanese teenage love flick. There’s nothing particularly memorable about the story and the only high point is the emotional scene where Akari watches an 8-mm film.

While utilizing sci-fi elements can render a love story romantic and adventurous, any love story requires at least decent delivery or execution. Time Traveller unfortunately does not meld its sci-fi elements and love story effectively, resulting in a forgettable story that is mediocre and homogeneous to every other Japanese love flick out there. The movie could have kept things simple by, say, following the footsteps of TokiKake, the anime, and concentrating more on the drama while disregarding the mechanics of time travel in total. TokiKake is memorable because of its simplicity and sentimentality. In contrast, Time Traveller‘s complexity and melodrama renders itself forgettable.

The Rating: 5

Reviewed by: AC