The Girl Who Leapt Through Time [時をかける少女, Toki o Kakeru Shōjo] (2006)

Starring Riisa Naka, Takuya Ishida, Mitsutaka Itakura, Sachie Hara, Mitsuki Tanimura

Directed by Mamoru Hosoda


If this were any other movie, discovering the power to time travel would start our protagonist on a great journey of superheroics. Maybe she would find some horrible crime that needed solving, or perhaps she would track down the X-Men and try to join the team, or if nothing else, she would become the villain of the piece. She would at least do something with her power. But when high school student Mokoto Konno finds out she can leap backwards in time, the first thing she does is head back to yesterday so she can eat her pudding before her sister steals it. This basically sums up much of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time as Mokoto uses her amazing new power for the most mundane circumstances.

The closest movie to compare this to might be Groundhog Day, but in that film reliving the same day over and over was a curse, while here Mokoto gleefully heads back to past moments to relive them or make them turn out better. She spends about ten hours straight at a karaoke bar leaping back whenever her time is up so she can start again. And when she comes home and finds that dinner isn’t the meal she was hoping for, it’s another quick hop to two nights before when they had her favorite.

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