(L) Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time)

[Shinndou]

I am going to watch this tomorrow, and I'll probably get my hands on the DVD as well. All these positive reviews and opinions are prompting me to consider this option, as I am sure that it won't be a waste of money anyway.

[Kaoru Chujo]

I just watched it and enjoyed it, but it didn't totally overwhelm me. There is incredible detail in the movement, but sometimes maybe too much for me. Like showing off for no aesthetic purpose.

Spoiler for image I don't want to put in your mind until you've seen the show:

And sometimes distant figures seemed boneless. A field full of people doing various things could sometimes look to me like a plate of wriggling maggots.

But when the motion worked, it really worked.

As for the story, I've read the original novella, so although there are a lot of differences between this and that, it wasn't so easy to surprise me. And I wasn't thrilled with the VAs, really. It took me a long time to get used to the lead's voice and delivery, as well as to some of the ways they animated her expressions.

But none of these cavils negates the fact that it is a technical triumph and a very enjoyable movie. Some of the backgrounds (the fork in the road, for example) were wonderful. And the romance elements of the story were interestingly done.

[wao]

Well that's strange. One of the things I liked the best about this movie is how the VAs managed to sound much more like high-school girls (we've had some Japanese ones visit our school and I've seen videos of them taken by friends) than most anime VAs could ever come close to. The speech patterns, the delivery, the way it fits so well with the animation... I wasn't so won over by Kousuke but I loved Makoto, especially her "eh?"s and extremely teenage-like utterences. It wasn't perfect - I felt the crying didn't really work - but it came across as much more refreshing and genuine to me than the typical anime voice nowadays. :/

I also felt it succeded where some Ghibli films didn't in that the voice + imagery combination left a much deeper impression despite both types of films utilizing non-typical voice actors (live-action actors etc.)

But that's just my opinion.

[stpehen]

Originally Posted by wao

...it came across as much more refreshing and genuine to me than the typical anime voice nowadays.

This basically hit it on the head for me. I really can't enjoy 95% of anime nowadays because I can't stand the actors. I don't know if it's they themselves or just uninspired voice direction in general, but there are NO big-time seiyu that I enjoy listening to. Makoto was really fun to listen to because she sounded like a teenager, not an actor.

[Kaoru Chujo]

I tend to like amateur and stage-actor voices myself. These just didn't do it for me somehow, at least on one viewing. I somehow couldn't feel them as personalities. As accurate as their speech might have been, it felt artificial or intentional to me, rather than fresh. But I'm overjoyed to have a more positive view to try to assimilate myself to. I much prefer liking a show to finding fault with it.

It's kind of cool to find myself on the other side of an argument I sometimes have with others, since I find many top seiyuus too smooth, so smooth that the emotion is under too much control (this doesn't apply to Hirano Aya, who is somewhat out of control as Layla, or to Paku Romi, who is in the right kind of control as Nana).

To tell the truth, the crying was one thing I thought worked, at least a lot better than most anime crying does, for me.

[serenade_beta]

Spoiler for Questions about the end:

So in the last parts of the movie, Chiaki reveals that he's from the future and says that he says that he can't meet with Makoto anymore and leaves somewhere. Later, she realizes she can still time leap one time and goes all the way to the beginning in the lab. She rushes off (after telling her friend that she likes Chiaki) and finds Chiaki. Then she tells him that she knows everything. Later, near the river (or somewhere like that), they talk for a while. Then he leaves. While Makoto is crying, he comes back and tells her that he'll be waiting in the future. She says something like she'll be there. Afterwards, we see Makoto playing baseball with Kousuke and those three girls. She says that she's decided on what to do.

Some questions to sort up my feelings:
So Chiaki came to this time to see a painting/or something like that, the movie never told why, did it?

So the end was kind of bittersweet? That Chiaki and Makoto couldn't end up together, since she couldn't leap through time anymore (I don't think she could go forward in time) and he went back to his time.

Any guess to what she decided?

By the way, is the "Tokikake" manga ongoing or is it only one volume?

[bakavic]

Spoiler for About those questions:

Disclaimer: What I understand so far might be wrong, as I don't think I understand much (if any) jap...so don't take it as the truth.

Near the river, Chiaki was saying that he has to go back to his time. Makoto gets all tsudere'd up, and asks him to just go. Then she cries. When Chiaki comes back, he tells her to look out for a time traveller. Makoto says she will wait for him now, tomorrow, as long as it takes.

Ok, to your questions:

About the painting, Chiaki said that during his time, the arts (had something wrong with them) and he very much wanted to see the works of masters from this time, thus he came to this location, this time to see them. But alas, the one he wanted to see (No.12 or something) seemed like it had been taken down from the viewing gallery, as it had to be protected or something.

Yup, the ending was possibly meant to be bittersweet, with a tinge of hope mixed in. I'm thinking that she will wait for him

Talking about Makoto not being able to leap forward in time - maybe it affects all users? Chiaki could go to Makoto's time because it was in his past?

About the manga, gotta ask NeoSam

Ya, the voice acting was really good - especially the students, as they really did sound like students.

Nice backgrounds and 3D effects (and to a lesser extent character animation), coupled with the VAs, and most of all the storyline, have made this one of the better anime movies.

I kinda got a bit hyped up about the whole show for the last few days, that I tried my hand at subbing it. However, 10 hours later, and lots of cursing and swearing, I can only present the first 5 mins:

http://www.mediafire.com/?82mk2gj2gwm

I really take my hat off to all subbers - the whole process is certainly not easy. A lot of the dialog seemed like it wasn't pure standard japanese - like slurs of certain words and short forms were used. Makes for hell when trying to decipher bursts of words.

BTW, I fully expect "Mass Naked Events"-level type of errors in the sub. Hell, some sentences were even left out since I could understand a word.

I think I had better leave the subbing to the pros at Saizen

[Kuroba]

I love this movie. I saw at the NY Children's film festival and I thought it was excellent. The characters, the story, even the ending...beautiful. I'd love to see it again. I really like the VA's too...they sounded totally believable as students.

Will Saizen make an .avi format of this movie? Because MKV's don't work on my computer... ^^;

[Scab]

Sorry, we won't. I know at least one more group is subbing this though, two if you want to go by rumors, so I guess one of those might release an AVI.

[miaka]

watched it and loved it. The background music is nice. i like the ending of this anime movie version than the live action dorama. Although the story is little different but still follow same patterns

[Killerattacks]

@Scab

I'd love to see your version with AC3. Some reasons:

- AC3 is already a lossy compression. So it won't be the best result transcoding it once again.
- Not all people watch their anime on a PC. And if you don't you have almost no possibility to decode 5.1 AAC with a HiFi System
- It will be unnecessary to include a stereo stream since if somebody only has a 2.0 or 2.1 system the stream will be downmixed most likely, if they didn't mess up their codec settings
- If you include more than one audio stream (and it seems that way) my guess would be that the majority would simply go with the first one (which would be the stereo stream I guess) simply because they aren't aware that they can switch streams or don't know how or think it is too much effort.

Just what I'm thinking about this. I'm really not trying to force you to anything.

If that was the case (only AC3) the audio stream would be ~300Mb. How about a 1,4 or 2 gigabyte h.264 encode?

[Kai1]

I saw on Tokyotosho that there is subbed version of it out by roxfan.

[Isochroma]

The subbed version by roxfan looks quite nice, just about as good as the 1.3gb raw. It only has 192k stereo 48khz mp3 audio, but it sounds good. I deleted the raw, it was that good.

Both (!) the OP and ED are softsubbed as well as main dialogue NO Hardsubs.

[Kai1]

I concur the quality. by the way, how come there are russian subs too?

[martino]

Maybe roxfan comes from Russia or knows Russian as a language as well, you never know...

[BluWacky]

roxfan is indeed Russian.

He's also an absolute legend, and if he happens to be reading this I can only say thank you very much! (and if it's never gone on public record, also thank you for subbing Princess Arete a couple of years back, which is literally the only fansub I have burnt on CD). I literally came home tonight intending to sit down and watch this unsubbed to discover your subtitled version (so I'll be watching it at the weekend instead!); I watched the first five minutes and I can tell this is going to be a very special film indeed.

So... yeah, thanks. Now I'm just annoyed I have to go to work tomorrow...

[HeadlessCow]

Roxfan is awesome <3

With no filtering on the DVD source, xvid quant 2 was 784 meg so there's not really much reason to go with anything larger than that. You could turn off b-frames and such... but the quality difference at even double the filesize should be negligible. We (roxfan) originally planned on 1.4 GiB, but since 700 was so easy, it was an easy choice to go with that instead. h264 could have probably squeezed out a bit more quality at that size, but it probably would have maxed out the codec at about the same filesize.

Since I was going on vacation as soon as I uploaded the encode (literally the last thing I did before leaving my house for the airport was to resume uploading the raw after our FTP ran out of space), I left the encode a few meg short of 700 so that any non-standard fonts that were used could be added in while I was gone.

AC3 audio just tends to be a pain since often it's mixed at a lower volume than a PCM/MPA track. I boosted it either 6 or 9 dB before I encoded it to MP3. Either people complain that it's quiet, or they expect a louder reencode of it... both are kinda annoying and 192kbit mp3 is pretty darned decent sounding when using LAME to encode it. Basically, there's no reason to add an audio track with half the bitrate of the video

You can mux the original AC3 track yourself if you really want it (I think there's a 5.1 track as well). There's no shift between the raw audio track and my reencode.

Sadly, since I went on vacation and I'm leeching crappy wireless from a sketchy hotel in Paris, I don't get to watch the movie until I get home next week :'(

[Vertago]

Anyone know if the novel has been translated to English? And if so whats it called?

I just watched the subbed version and I loved it. Though like people have been saying the end is quite bittersweet but it didn't change how great this movie was.

Spoiler:

Like it would of been nice if they had a scene at the end showing her in the future meeting up with Chiaki. IMO it was sorta depressing how he said he'd be waiting in the future. But wouldn't she be a lot older than him? Or will he travel back again? Ahhhh the ending makes me want more.

[bakavic]

The novel goes by the same name (Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo), but the official english translation seems to be different (The Little Girl Who Conquered Time). Probably not translated by anyone yet. (It's pretty old)

EDIT: Ok, a quick google brings up this page - http://honyaku.livejournal.com/profile. Apparently he/she has plans to translate tokikake, and has started translating another novel. Unfortunately, her last journal post was in Jan :/

Look at 1st post for more details.

Btw, Kagami from Lucky Star was reading it in ep 4 lol.

@HeadlessCow: Any chance the sub by itself would be release for us raw d/lers? It's going to be painful re-d/ling the whole movie again lol. Also a chance to see how badly my translation screwed up

[DragoonKain3]

Unlike most people, I actually didn't like it that much. Oh sure, it kept me interested throughout the entire movie, but the enjoyability factor wasn't there for me. Kousuke was bland, and I really wasn't interested in Chiaki's character period. Saving grace was the time travel stuff (I'm a big sucker for those kind of stories) and of course, Makoto, of who was wonderfully done.

The ending in particular was the killer for me...

Spoiler:

mainly because I really wanted to strangle Chiaki when he said that he's waiting in the future, and can only shake my head when Makoto said she'll go. I think this was meant to be a tearjerker, but IMO the movie would've been much better off cutting it out altogether.

Why? Admittedly, the main reason is that because that scene is there, she can't move on and so will dedicate her life to reuniting with Chiaki. Coupled with the fact of her aunt's situation, the movie is giving off the message that love begins and ends with the first one. Something of which I terribly disagree on.

But another reason is logically. Thinking about it, chances are Makoto won't ever see him again. Chiaki will never come back, because even Makoto's aunt's lover from the future (missed the clues, didn't you?) hasn't come back ever since high school. And even if I'm wrong about that, if its forbidden for people from the past from knowing about time travel, I think its not a stretch to think that they would ever send someone back just to have relations with them. (The ramifications of that is humongous to say the least)

So the other solutions include that Makoto develops time travel herself. Which in itself is a paradox, since her motivation is to be reunited with someone who met her using the time travel machine she's supposed to develop in the first place. Or she could hope that Chiaki is born within her lifetime, though that denotes that someone else will perfect time travel in the near future, which is not a bet one would like to make.

The only way she can be reunited with Chiaki is if, within her lifetime, she not only develops but actually perfect the means of keeping people in suspended animation. The possiblity exists, but man, that is ever so small. If she fails, she would've wasted all her life for no reason at all, and that saddens me greatly to see such a fate befall upon Makoto.

IMO, nowhere near as good as people claim to be. I find Brave Story to be the better movie, but then again that's just one person's opinion.