The Anime Review of the Year 2008 Part 2
Friday, 2nd January 2009, 15:59

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1. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

This film wasn’t even on my radar at the start of the year, and when it turned up just prior to Christmas it almost felt like an afterthought. It didn’t help that the review disc was a DVD-R, a cut down version of the retail disc, something that usually puts me in an “I’m going to hate this” frame of mind. On top of that, we had just had a bumper year for anime features in the UK, with the release of Vexille, Appleseed Ex Machina, Origin, Brave Story, The Utena movie, Lupin III: The Secret of Mamo, and Space Adventure Cobra. One more feature film felt a little like overkill. Except that The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was the best of the lot, garnering the Japanese Academy’s first ever Best Animation Award in 2007. It’s a film with a past, based on a 1965 novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, and is in some ways a sequel to that novel, and the two previous live action films that have been adapted from it.

Makoto Konno is your typical tomboy, an occasionally klutzy and not too smart young girl who’s in her last year of high school. But it’s summer, and she prefers to spend her time with best friends Kousuke and Chiaki playing catch and swinging at pitches instead of truly thinking about her future. That all changes one day, when riding home from school, the brakes fail on her bike and she’s killed in an accident. Except that she isn’t. She lands in a heap, back up the hill, a few seconds before she would have been killed. Makoto’s discovered her inner power, she can leap back into time, and pretty soon she’s having fun, leaping back to snaffle the pudding that her kid sister stole that morning, re-sitting her maths test to get a perfect score, arranging not to look like a ditz in home economics, or spending a whole day singing karaoke. It looks as if the perfect summer will last forever, but things get teen angst complicated when someone confesses his love to her, and she soon learns that no matter how much you travel through time, certain things are inevitable.


This is the best new film I’ve seen this year. And yes, that includes live action. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a perfect peach of a film that tells a charming story, with wonderful characters and with a magnificent imaginative scope. In some ways it’s the most accessible sort of sci-fi, where the time travel is a device to tell a very human, heart-warming, comic and emotional story, with the emphasis on character growth. TGWLTT’s English dub is spectacular. It’s a sign of how far dubs have come since the bad old days of Manga Video. The English voice actors are perfectly cast for their roles, and they capture the emotional strength of the characters, the verisimilitude that the story requires without flaw. They carry the emotional weight of the film and watching it you simply forget that it’s animated.


Yet it is one of the best animations that I have seen recently. It’s courtesy of Madhouse Studios of course, and they bring an attention to detail and realism to the anime that is simply astounding. The character designs are simple but memorable, and the character animation is detailed and expressive. Placed into the detailed backgrounds, the atmospheric visuals and remarkable vision of a small town at the height of summer, watching the film is a wholly relaxing experience. As for the story… well I’m not going to tell you more than I already have. It’s a film that deserves to be discovered for yourself. But I will tell you that it does what all the best films do; it runs you through the gamut of emotions in its brief run time. You’ll be laughing out loud, cringing in embarrassment, your heart will be in your throat, it will have you in tears, and you’ll be uplifted with joy. Having to choose just one title to recommend from this list is like asking me to sacrifice nine of my children to save just one. But there you have it. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time ought to be on every DVD shelf. By law.


That’s it for another year, and 2008 has delivered a bumper crop of anime to these shores, despite the economic downturn. There are already some choice titles in the pipeline for 2009 too, despite ADV and Revelation effectively spinning their wheels for now. Revelation aim to complete their titles currently on hiatus, and they also have some boxsets in store for those who missed out on Full Metal Alchemist and Spiral the first time around. Titles to look out for from MVM include Desert Punk, Romeo X Juliet, Blade Of The Immortal, Samurai Deeper Kyo, and the classic Slayers, while among Manga Entertainment’s many acquisitions for 2009 are the awesome Darker Than Black, Claymore, Honey & Clover, the Negima?! remake, Baldr Force EXE, Ghost Hunt, Ichigo 100%, Naruto Shippuden, Blue Dragon, Afro Samurai: Resurrection, Ghost in the Shell 2.0, Ouran High School Host Club, Sasami, Save Me Lollipop, Black Blood Brothers, Jyu Oh Sei… Inhale. Exhale.

After all that, Beez’s line up may seem like an anticlimax, but let’s face it you can never turn down more Gundam, and the Sword of the Stranger movie is said to be one of the best anime features in recent years. Then of course there is the trump card, Gurren Laggan, which if anything actually comes with more hype than Haruhi did. If all that isn’t enough for you, you can jump the gun and look to the US, and titles that I already have my eye on include the stunning Bacanno, the Evangelion 1.0 movie, the cleaned up and remastered Berserk, the budget Wolf’s Rain boxset (currently pre-tailing for under £18 at PlayUSA) and more. Meanwhile Crunchyroll has ditched the fansubs and user videos, and are now solely an outlet for legal anime online. They look to be starting the New Year with a line up of over a hundred titles, with more constantly being added. A little heads up though; two of the last releases of 2008 were the Welcome to the NHK half season boxsets, which are currently in postal limbo for me. Naturally I’ll be watching them in the New Year and they’ll be the ones to knock off my number one slot come the 2009 countdown.

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Posted by Jitendar Canth