Review for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time: 2-Disc Collector's Edition (Review)
Wednesday, 11th August 2010, 17:59

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Introduction
I do watch DVDs again! You'd think that with all the review discs and all my own purchases, that finding time to re-watch a film or a television show would be impossible. But that is the whole point of DVDs, re-watchability. I have to admit though that I do have a long time between viewings now. It's been eighteen months since I last looked at The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and I had totally forgotten that Manga had sent me a screener disc to review. This winter just past, the 2-disc version of the film got a general release (it had just been an HMV exclusive before), so rather than just put the screener in again, I eagerly ordered the retail version with all the extra goodies. Now I get to check out the audiovisual qualities, and all those juicy extra features. The thing is that in the interim, I got a rare chance to see this film in the cinema, so this disc has a lot to live up to.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was easily the best anime feature film release of 2008 in the UK, it garnered the Japanese Academy's first ever Best Animation Award one year prior. 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. If you're going to try and categorise it, it would fall into the sci-fi romantic comedy bracket, but it would be far easier to just buy a copy and decide for yourself.

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.

Picture
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time gets a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer. It's an NTSC-PAL standards conversion, which is a tad disappointing, but it's one of the better such that I have seen. You will only really notice a slight overall softness, and some interlacing if you hit pause and frame advance your way through the disc. Just watching the film makes these issues fade away. The image quality is solid, with a clear and colourful transfer. The animation is exquisite, offering excellent detail, and vivid, if slightly simplistic character designs. It's the way that the characters are animated that gives them a genuine feeling of humanity, not necessarily the number of freckles on a face. There is some slight mosquito noise around frenetic motion, but otherwise this is a top-notch anime transfer.

Sound
You have the choice between DD 5.1 and DD 2.0 in both English and Japanese, with a sole translated subtitles track. The dialogue is clear throughout, and the dynamic sound design comes through well with the surround presentation. The music also adds to a very amenable viewing experience, although the surround does show up an error in the subtitling. I think that the subtitlers worked from the central dialogue channel to create the captions. There are scenes in the film where voices come from the rear and around the soundstage. When there isn't any dialogue in the central channel, there aren't any subtitles, which means in one important scene, subtitles are missing. The gist is still there though, and you can also switch to the English dub. It was also a problem in the theatrical print that I saw, and it's a shame it couldn't be rectified for the DVD release.

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