Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is about a girl named Akari (Riisa Naka) who travels back in time to find a mysterious man, as per the request of her mother, Kazuko Yoshiyama (Narumi Yasuda).
It all started when Kazuko received a picture from her long-time friend, Goro Asakura (Masanobu Katsumura). It is her in 1972 standing beside a man she cannot remember. Which is strange, because somewhere deep within her, she feels she knows him. Also inside the envelope is a single lavender.
While trying to remember who he is, she gets into a car accident that leaves her in a comatose state. Her daughter Akari tends to her at the hospital, waiting for any sign of recovery.
Then one day, Kazuko suddenly wakes up. She tells Akari that she must travel to the past using the elixir she had been developing. She needs to go back to April 1972 and find the man in the picture, whom she names as Kazuo Fukamachi, her first love, and deliver a message to him, a message she whispers only to Akari.
Though hesitant, Akari obliges her mother’s request. She drinks the elixir and wishes herself back in time. At first, nothing happened. Then she finds herself falling, landing on an aspiring young filmmaker named Ryota Mizorogi (Akiyoshi Nakao).
Upon learning that Akari is indeed from the future, Ryota agrees to help her with her mission. But Akari soon realizes she has made a crucial mistake. Instead of April 1972, she arrived in September 1974, two years off from her intended destination.
Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is based on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a novel so influential that it helped inspire an entire ongoing subgenre of Japanese films, manga, visual novels, and anime centered on time travel and coming-of-age themes. In fact, this 2010 film is the fourth adaptation of that novel.
But here is a fun fact: Time Traveller is also a direct sequel to the very first live-action adaptation of Tsutsui’s novel, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, directed by the great Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1983. That is a twenty-seven year gap from its predecessor.
What makes this more interesting is that Tsutsui never wrote a sequel to his beloved novel, so Time Traveller had to build one from the ground up using the same source material. It doesn’t simply retell the original story. Instead, it uses the foundation Obayashi built and moves it forward by following the daughter of Kazuko Yoshiyama.
With all of that established, I can say this: Time Traveller has a lot to live up to as an adaptation, a sequel, and an original story, yet it somehow manages to feel distinct from everything that came before it and can surprisingly stand on its own.
I would describe Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time as a flavorful dish that looks too plain. It doesn’t really stand out visually, and I don’t see most people picking it up to watch it because of that. It actually looks like a TV movie, very far from the dream-like and imaginative aesthetic of its predecessor.
Yet if you can get past that optic test, it offers a genuinely different take on the source material. Not the best take, but an interesting one, particularly once it decided that it will not be bothered by the weight of the first film and settles into a story that is quietly and entirely its own. I appreciate it choosing to focus solely on Akari, letting her understand love by both witnessing and experiencing it. And through that journey, the film arrives at its most profound idea: that love and loss leave marks on us more everlasting than memory. It is a little tragic if you think about it, but the film frames it with undeniable beauty.
Perhaps my only real complaint is that the science-fiction time-loop mechanic at the heart of this story is never used to its full potential here. It happens only twice, and that’s it. It would have been interesting to see it play a larger role in the story.
Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a cheerful and understated sequel to one of Japan’s most beloved stories. It leans into the realistic side of the source material, trading spectacle for sincerity, unlike its more imaginative counterparts. But overall, that’s okay. It is still an enjoyable film, and it still finds a way to carry the enduring message of love, loss, and memory forward.
3.5/5
Now streaming on JFF Theater.