, 1983) was another sci-fi-inflected idol film adapted from a popular literary work, but made on a bigger budget and, at the request of producer Kadokawa Haruki, set this time in Obayashi’s hometown of Onomichi, a port city not far from Hiroshima.
This made
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in Onomichi a very personal film for him, despite its source as a popular short story and its genesis as a gift made to young star Harada Tomoyo from producer Kadokawa, who had fallen in love with the actress during the audition process.
Love surrounded the production, apparently, and Obayashi claimed that the short story, though sci-fi, was perfect for an old-fashioned love story. Setting the film in his hometown, he gave it an nostalgic tinge, while incorporating events and locations taken from his own youthful years.
Harada plays Yoshiyama Kazuko, an ordinary if over-achieving high school girl who has an accident one day while cleaning the school’s chemistry lab, and wakes up with ability to shift time. She re-lives one day of her life, Groundhog Day-style, and is able to “predict” an earthquake and resulting fire in town.
But things become more complicated when she learns that Fukamachi, one of her classmates, not only can shift time, but is also a traveling scientist from the future sent back to rescue his world’s dying ecology.
With a dreamlike feeling suffusing the entire film, mirroring Kazuko’s own mindset, its fantasy elements may be lighter than those in House or School in the Crosshairs, and used primarily to evoke Kazuko’s altered state of mind, but they are no less delightfully effective.
Obayashi’s cinephilia surfaces in a prominently-placed Wizard of Oz (1939) poster in Kazuko’s bedroom, as well as photos of Judy Garland. (The director even introduces story elements from Oz into the mix, such as when Kazuko is told by Fukamachi that she’ll forget her experiences with him when she wakes up.)
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is one of the director’s favorites among his films, and he considers it one of his most personal movies. That feeling is conveyed within the film itself, with its bittersweet story about the transitoriness of love and the importance of one’s memories in keeping the past alive.
Kadokawa financed The Girl Who Leapt Through Time himself and when it turned out to be a huge success at the box office and made Harada a star, he was able to convince her to stay in the business (she’d previously been considering quitting).
It also cemented Kadokawa’s reputation as a hitmaker and an industry power in his own right.