Time Traveller / The Time Traveller: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Viewed on Streaming. Subtitles = eight (8) stars; cinematography = seven (7) stars; CGI/effects = six (6) stars. Director Masaaki Taniguchi's tale is crafted to appeal to a much broader audience than what the usual teenage chick flick targets. Taniguchi cleverly blends romance, science fiction, comedy, heart-rendering emotional drama, and suspense. (Mercifully, there are no scenes of Japanese cuteness!) One of the Director's objectives is to illustrate just how messy time travel can be (except for ants?) due to the creation of alternative time lines, and, especially, when it involves teenagers from different times who happen to meet up and share a romantic adventure. Leading actress Riisa Naka's performance is a Tour De Force of emotional highs and lows. Supporting cast members are also very good with the possible exception of the actor who stiffly plays a memory-wiping, bland character from five hundred years in the future (what ever romantic appeal he might have had as a real/virtual teenager in the 1970s seems to have been lost in time!). Cinematography (semi-wide screen, color) is good but could benefit from a deep-focus process where both background and foreground can be clearly seen simultaneously (the back and forth shift in the camera's focus during close-ups can be distracting and lessen the impact of dialog exchanges). Within and between scene lighting is good. Music is a bit on the heavy side for such a minor picture (it would seem to be more suitable for a larger-scale production?). CGI/effects are modest, but not cheesy. Subtitles strike an excellent balance between literal and literary translations. They are just right in length and screen duration. However, song lyrics are not translated. Recommended. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

I saw this film as part of the "Imagine" film festival 2011 in Amsterdam. It was announced as a (start quote) moving live-action comedy about time travel and impossible loves (end quote). All of those qualifications being true, the overwhelming number of paradoxes, inconsistencies and impossibilities come in the way of fully enjoying the story. Maybe I was prejudiced, having seen the much better film "The Door" (Anno Saul, 2009) that same afternoon, also having time travel as its main ingredient.The human drama elements compensate a lot of these problems. Those will carry the story for the full two hours that this film takes of your time. It is precisely where the words "moving" and "loves" in the announcement stand for. It will entertain a broad audience.The net result was that I never got bored. But I had mixed feelings nevertheless, while imagining how a script like this could be turned into something more acceptable in the technical sense. I have no solution handy, however, and maybe we should leave this as an exercise for the reader.When leaving the theater, I gave a "satisfactory" score for the public prize competition. The SF lover in me was annoyed by the many impossibilities in the story, but the overall result was nevertheless entertaining with several hilarious as well as some moving moments. I'm sure it will attract the average viewer. You can take your complete family with you to enjoy this film, but you should leave your geek nephew at home since he will spoil the afternoon while pointing out at least 30 time travel paradoxes.

It is a pretty solid mash of romance and drama with sci-fi. I usually fall asleep in romance movie or find those movies a bit hard to watch with all the lovely-dovely stuff like the Twilight movies. But in this case, I was entertained because this movie actually moves on a brisk pace and kept me in suspense.The story: Riisa Naka acts as a goofy but cute girl, Akari whose mother had an accident. She is being told to travel to the year 1972 to convey a message to someone her mother likes. Well, the travelling antidote helps her to travel through time. This movie is not supposed to be realistic so suspend your belief because later when the slight twist is revealed as the mystery person whom Akari's mother wants her to tell him a message finally appears, it will become a little far-fetched. Anyway, during the time finding the mystery guy, Akari slowly falls in love with a director, Ryota who helps her and lets her stay in his house. The story is predictable, but the movie moves in such a brisk pace with suspense that I would not mind but to go along with Akari's adventure. Riisa Naka does a pretty good job in acting like goofy but cute girl with some priceless moments. And she has a likable face too. I can't wait to see her in Zebra man 2.Overall: It is a pretty entertaining Japanese movie. No idea where all the negative critic reviews in Singapore come from but this movie may entertain if you are willing to suspend belief and go along with the adventure. It may be bashed up by blockbusters in Christmas but it should be worth a watch on DVD.

Taniguchi Masaaki's "Toki O Kakeru Shojo" (AKA Time Traveler) is an entertaining and enjoyable time-spanning romance that while doesn't particularly differ that greatly from its predecessors in its approach, still manages to be an engaging and not-at-all too redundant film."Toki O Kakeru Shojo" (or Tokikake) is probably the most adapted modern short story in Japanese Literature. As of date, there have been eight different versions of the Tsutsui Yasutaka story in both TV and movies -- the NHK drama "Time Traveler ('72) with Shimada Junko; the '83 movie with Harada Tomoyo; the Fuji TV Drama special ('84) with Minamino Yoko; the Fuji TV Drama special ('94) with Uchida Yuki; the '97 movie with Nakamoto Nana; the TBS TV special ('02) with Abe Natsumi, Hosoda Mamoru's fan-favorite anime movie ('06) and most recently Yatate Hajime's anime TV series ('09).With this many variations, remakes and reiterations of the story, you'd think how much more different could this movie be especially after Hosoda made what seemed like the definitive version. Yet "Time Traveler" successfully distinguishes itself by introducing some clever time-travel twists and using references from the other versions in its story.Adorably cute Naka Riisa (who voiced Konno Makoto in the "Toki O Kakeru Shojou/The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" anime) portrays Yoshiyama Akari, a bubbly Japanese high school student who has just passed her exams to go to college. Her mother is Kazuko (80s J-Dorama idol Yasuda Narumi) who is a chemist and pharmaceutical researcher who is obsessed with the year 1972(Showa Year 47) and has been working on a time-traveling elixir made from rare Lavender extracts.When local liquor vendor Asagura Gorou (Tatsumura Masanobu) shows Kazuko an old photo of her with another classmate, a flood of memories comes back to her and in a moment of distraction, she is involved in a traffic accident and is left in a coma. During a brief gain of consciousness, she tells Akari to use her test elixir to go the specific date (4/6/1972), the year she was in Junior High and find Fukamachi Kazuo(Kanji Ishimaru), the classmate in the photo and relate a message to him. Taking one of the Lavender elixirs, Akari focuses on the date that her mother gave her however, when Akari wakes up she finds herself instead in 2/6/1974 (she had mixed up the date). Frantic, she tries to find the whereabouts of both her mother (now a high student in Yokohama and portrayed by Ishibashi Anna) and get more information from her. With the help of 70s sci-fi movie "Otaku" Fuzoroki Ryota (J-Dorama Rookies' Nakao Akiyoshi) and his hippie cameraman "Gotetsu" AKA Hasegawa Masamichi (Aoki Munetaka), who may or may not be one of Kazuko's high school lovers, Akari tries to contact Fukamachi, who we learn to be a fellow time traveler from the year 2060 who had gotten stuck in the year 1972.Yet things get complicated when Akari and Ryota begin to fall in love and Akria learns that Ryota is destined to die in a bus accident in the same year.The strength of the film definitely falls with versatile Naka Riisa, who has made quite a splash since her "Tokikake" Seiyuu/voice work days having starred in a number of TV J-Doramas and films including Tominaga Masanori's "Pandora's Box" and portraying the sexy Lady Gaga-type villain "Zebra Queen" in Miike Takashi's "Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City". Naka is very charming on screen and her Akari is such a delightfully sweet and fun character. Nakao Akiyoshi is also no stranger to remakes having starred in the 2006 TV series adaptation of the 1981 Kadokawa film "Sailor Fuku and Kikanjyu" and here he has a much more substantive role as the likable character of Ryota, an amateur filmmaker whose dream project is a love story set in 2010 and features some of the items that Akari showed him (like a cellphone). There is definitely romantic chemistry between his Ryota and Naka's Akari characters and I liked how director Taniguchi made it very poignant and tender. I like how their romance was mirrored by the time-spanning love between Kazuko and her enigmatic lover Fukamachi.What I most liked about Taniguchi and screenwriter Kanno Tomoe's adaptation is that they used a lot of references to the other "Tokikake" films (more so than any other version) especially with regards to the titular 1983 Kadokawa version with Harada Tomoyo. We finally get an updated version of that film's title song compliments of hit J-Pop group Ikimonogakari which is just as good (and perhaps even better) than Harada's original. We also get a lot of references to the other film adaptations such as having Akari be a Japanese Archery student (similar to the 1983 version) and the use of the 1972 year reference (which was the year that the first "Tokiokake" film debuted which coincidentally was also titled "Time Traveler"). Even Yasuda Narumi's character Kazuko is alluded to as being possibly the same character as the one Nakamoto Nana portrayed in the 1997 version. This is Taniguchi's first feature film debut after helping as an assistant director on such films such as "GTO" and "Pachigi! Love & Peace" and he does a great job of creating a surprisingly moving, romantic film. His recreation of Tokyo in the year 1974 is pretty impressive and he definitely captures the look, fashion and atmosphere of that year. While the time-traveling sequence in the beginning is a bit goofy (similar to the 1983 film) it still was a nice bit of SFX (almost "Alice In Wonderland" like).Although it would have been great to have original "Tokikake" heroine Harada Tomoyo make a cameo appearance in this version, I was quite pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the film. Hopefully this will be the last of the "Tokikake" films as I'm not sure how much more variance you can put to the story.