One Forgotten Japanese Sci-Fi Movie Predated A Beloved Anime Adaptation By Decades

The films of Nobuhiko Obayashi are a particularly satisfying and surprising niche in Japanese cinema. His filmography is bookended with dazzling works that combine the exuberance of adolescence with discoveries of historic suffering — beginning with House in 1977, and concluding with Hanagatami in 2017 and Labyrinth of Cinema, which released months after the director’s demise in 2020.

During the 1980s, Obayashi directed several adaptations of sci-fi books and travelogues for entertainment conglomerate Kadokawa. After acquiring four of these films last year, boutique Blu-ray label Cult Epics have now released The Girl Who Leapt Through Time on 4K, giving audiences the chance to discover an underrated gem from a director who made fantastical teen films like no-one else, which predated Mamoru Hosoda’s more widely seen 2006 anime version.

How was The Girl Who Leapt Through Time received upon release?

Obayashi had an early hit with young audiences in 1977 with the bizarre and breathlessly original House, a haunted house film with a cast of rambunctious and sensitive teenagers and giddying optical effects. In the early ‘80s, Obayashi was trying to settle into a more commercial groove without losing his cinematic adventurousness, and he struck gold with the time travel romance The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (also known in English as The Little Girl Who Conquered Time). While it wasn’t Obayashi’s first adaptation of popular juvenile literature, it was his most successful — the film was one of the highest earning Japanese movies of 1983, making a star out of its lead, the Kadokawa idol Tomoyo Harada. It remained a personal favourite of Obayashi, not least because it was set in his birthplace, the city of Onomichi.

Why is The Girl Who Leapt Through Time important to see now?

In the film, Kazuko Yoshiyama (Harada) is cleaning after class with her two friends, Goro Horikawa (Toshinori Omi) and Kazuo Fukamachi (Ryōichi Takayanagi), when she faints in the school laboratory after inhaling lavender-smelling smoke. From then on, the young student starts experiencing time in an abnormal way — a speeding cyclist clips through the air in front of her, and during archery class her arrow hits the target before she fires it.

When the entire day resets to the one before, Kazuko excels in class because she knows her teacher will spring a test on her, but she also frets about loose tiles and surprise earthquakes hurting her friends before they happen. She grows closer to the sensitive, intellectual Fukamachi, falling in love with him without anticipating how he’s connected to her time-slipping condition.

Obayashi’s films dance across a rich spectrum of emotion — his heightened, peppy, and earnest sensibilities grants him the ability to dip into surreal fantasy and nimbly step between comic and melancholic tones. By adapting the popular 1967 novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, the director could incorporate surreal, magic trick-esque editing and absurd optical and chroma-key effects. At the heart of the story is a young girl on an unorthodox journey of discovery, and the story of past colliding with future is reflected in the world around her; Onomichi’s narrow streets, stone steps, and tiled roofs feel firmly historic, but the foregrounding of springtime blossom trees and colorful lavenders evokes a constant sense of renewal and possibility. The film’s notably impulsive form of time travel is perfect for characters speeding through the trickier phases of adolescence, and the later, tragic reveal that Kazuko’s most poignant childhood memories have been supernaturally altered is a clever parallel for how imperfectly we process our personal attachments in our most inexperienced years.

The “love triangle” angle of Tsutsui’s novel is prominent in the story’s best-known adaptation: Mamoru Hosoda’s 2006 animated film, which brings the story to the 21st century as a loose sequel to the novel. Hosoda’s film was not an immediate box office hit, but thanks to an English dub and Hosoda’s continued success as a director, it continued to find new audiences.

The animated version expands the relationships and predicaments of high schooler Makoto (Riisa Naka) who giddily and frivolously uses her time-travel powers to erase classroom mishaps, play matchmaker with her school peers, and eat a delicious family dinner for a second time. There’s far less striking atmosphere than Obayashi’s film, but a much busier relationship plot, and the way that Hosoda plays with the line between serious and silly reasons to alter the past makes Makoto’s self-actualization funny one minute and grave the next. And yet Hosoda works overtime to match the potent, overwhelming emotional pathos that Obayashi conjures with ease.

Despite the cult reputation of House, fewer of Obayashi’s films have travelled internationally than Hosoda’s, but this live-action version of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a striking, confident precursor to the animated version, as it capably captures how mystery and sci-fi compliment the adolescent experience through Obayashi’s singular style.

What new features does The Girl Who Leapt Through Time Blu-ray have?

This release is a brand new 4K restoration straight from the camera negative, with remastered Japanese audio tracks and improved English subtitles. Cult Epics commissioned two new visual essays for the blu-ray release, one by Obayashi scholar Alex Pratt (who’s also recorded a commentary track) and one by his biographer Max Robinson – the perfect introduction to anyone who wants to dive into his unpredictable oeuvre. There are also archival interviews with Obayashi, a featurette on lead actress and music idol Tomoyo Harada. For the fans who buy early, Cult Epics include a reproduction of the original Japanese 24-page souvenir program that accompanied the film’s 1983 release.