時をかける少女

“Makoto” is one of those young girls who would probably be late for her own funeral. Every morning is a last minute rush as she gulps her breakfast then heads to high school and her two best friends “Kosuke” and “Chiaki” to continue with her very mediocre education! Indeed, the best part of their day is spent playing baseball and chatting and putting the world to rights. One afternoon, whilst she is investigating something curious in the laboratory she finds herself in a sort of puzzling Groundhog Day! She is reliving the same moments with the same outcome each time. After a quick chat with her “Auntie Witch”, she optimistically concludes that she might be able to change things for the better and help her friends - but each time she realises that there are as many unpredictable outcomes that she hadn’t or couldn’t factor in as there were improvements from her actions. Indeed, many of her interventions made things decidedly worse! Things become even more complex when her friend “Chiaki” suggests that they might like to date! Just how many times can she revisit that scenario without ending up ruining their friendship? Now I can’t pretend that I liked the young lass - in fact I found her really quite annoying, but as she to’s and fro’s guessing and second-guessing the domino effects of her actions, and as we see that unpredictably deliver serious, mischievous and funny results, the film livens up nicely. Though you might think it could tend to the repetitious, it doesn’t at all and the last twenty minutes introduce us to an unexpected twist that brings so much of the preceding hour into an amiable, maybe even slightly sentimental, perspective. The animation itself is simple, yet vividly detailed, and as the story recycles itself there are some sometimes quite subtle differences incorporated from time to time to keep the imagery interesting as this young girl makes discoveries about herself and her friends that suggest that there’s no such thing as a quick fix.