Tokikake Saturday

Even though it rained this past Monday, I still felt we barely had any rain this past month. So when I woke to a cloudy, dusty gray sky today, I thought, yes! Rain again. By lunch time, it was pouring. And it rained again late in the night, through the night, for most of the night.

It was a good Saturday, because, believe it or not, I finally played my first game of Scrabble with my mother and two of her friends. I'm happy to report I won, and my mom came in second. After I ran off for a movie in the afternoon, my mother won the next game. Woo-hoo!

I'd imagined Saturday couldn't be better after the rain and Scrabble, but then the Japanese anime I caught at Orchard Cineleisure pushed it to the top of a short list of great Saturdays. I first discovered "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" or "Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo" or "Tokikake" (for short) at the Kinokuniya bookstore. In the manga section, tacked on a pillar is a huge poster of a schoolgirl in a short skirt leaping across a blue sky. "Opening in June," the sign said. I went home, did a Google search and found out that it'd won a major Japanese animation award - beating out even a Studio Ghibli film - and received many, many good reviews from critics and viewers lucky enough to have seen it in the few film festivals it played at.

The film's main delight is a high school girl, Makoto, who discovers the ability to time-leap or jump into the past. She tries out her power hesitantly at first, and then moves on to bigger things like singing karaoke for 10 hours (going back in time after each karaoke session ends), acing surprise tests that are no longer surprises to her, averting the usual school disasters like frying tempura in home econ and getting huge guys tossed in her direction. But when time-leaping involves fixing things for or about her best friends - two blokes named Chiaki and Kousuke - without their knowledge, the results get a little more complicated.

I loved the scenes of modern Tokyo; the lovely friendship between Makoto and the boys; how real their characters seemed in speech and behavior; the fine comedy of errors and bumbling efforts achieved only by high school students; the brilliant soundtrack with two classical solo piano pieces that reminded me of the hours I spent practicing piano as a teenager. Mostly, I loved the story and how it made me feel - nostalgic, wistful, thoughtful about how it's impossible to avoid certain events and being responsible for the effects if you did attempt to avoid them. There's something about high school (or in my case, junior college) that's unlike any other phase in life, and watching "Tokikake" made me wish, just for a few moments, that I was seventeen again, brimming with the kind of energy that makes a schoolgirl leap across a blue sky.

It's playing exclusively at Cathay cinemas in Singapore, and I expect only for a short period. Go watch it if you can. I've read that even non-anime viewers found it charming, moving, and very delightful.

Here's the trailer.
And a few reviews.

Posted by Monoceros at June 16, 2007 11:00 PM