Watched this movie on Netflix streaming a couple of weeks back! fantastic movie!!The plot is fairly straight-forward - scientist mother invents a liquid that enables time-travel. She has an accident and is in near coma. but she asks the daughter for a favor and the daughter has to go back in time to fix it. Except that the daughter goes back in time to the wrong year. How the daughter still manages to fix things for her mom is the rest of the story.I can't really find fault with anything in the movie - except for maybe the overall concept of time travel. It was shot really well and when I connected the dots, it was like "whoa" - that's awesome!

I know one of the other reviews commented that it moved at a brisk pace but I have to disagree; there are just too many scenes that are dragged out. It's a two hour movie that could have been cut by a half an hour. Plot was nothing to write home about; nothing really happens that wouldn't have happened in a standard romance. There definitely wasn't any mind boggling concepts of time travel. Many missed opportunities that the time travel concept lends itself to. I did like the female lead, she definitely carried the movie; the male lead character was very shy, very common in real life but rather boring in a movie. This movie reminds me of a Saturday afternoon special movie.If you pass on this movie your life would be no worse off.

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.

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.