aka Toki o kakeru shôjo
Plot synopsis
Makoto is a teenage girl, who discovers she can leap back through time to change past events.
She visits her aunt who tells her, “that was a time leap … time is irreversible … you cannot reverse the flow of time … which means that you were the one who went back in time … you travelled through time and returned to the past!”
Makoto starts by using her newfound power to avoid being late for school. She then goes on to use her leaps to avoid embarrassing social situations.
She notices a tattoo of the number 10 has appeared on her arm, which reduces by one each time she leaps through time. Makoto then starts to use her leaps to help friends until she runs out of leaps. However, she needs one more to prevent her close friend, Kōsuke, from being killed in an accident.
Suddenly, time is frozen all around by another close friend, Chiaki, who tells her that he is actually a time traveller from the future. He uses his last leap to save Kōsuke, but this means that he is unable to return to his home.
He disappears, but somehow leaves Makoto with one more time leap tattooed on her arm. She uses it to go back to when she first gained her powers.
Makoto finds Chiaki and warns him that he will run out of leaps if he does not return to his own time right away. She realises she is in love with him, and before he leaves, he tells her that he will “wait for her in the future”.
My comments
This Japanese animated feature film is roughly a continuation of a novel of the same title by Yasutaka Tsutsui, which was set 20 years before the plot of the film.
Note how Makoto uses time travel to go back in time to avoid being late for her class, just as Hermione did in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004).
The meaning of the ending when Chiaki says that he will wait for Makoto in the future is ambiguous and open to interpretation.
Summary of time travel
Every leap back in time causes a new diverging timeline, which replaces the original one.
Category of time travel
Fantasy: unexplained.
Model of time
Open past, open future with a diverging timeline.
