The anime director’s new feature follows a pattern of his 2006 film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and even Summer Wars. While he’s grown as an artist since Digimon: The Movie, this is why Hosoda will always be Hosoda with every new film.
Mamoru Hosoda has made a name for himself as the director of fantastical anime, though as weird as his films become, they remain centered on the emotional journey, and providing catharsis that the real world rarely offers.
His latest work Mirai, and one of his earliest, the 2006 film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, both ground high concept sci-fi in coming-of-age tales. Mirai follows four-year-old Kun who, after the birth of his baby sister, is visited by versions of his family members from the past and the future. Through these impossible interactions, he begins to reassess his relationships with his new sister, as well as the rest of his family. While The Girl Who Leapt Through Time explores how your actions affect the people around you. These films have their characters learn of greater worlds beyond themselves, and each frame of this process is immensely detailed and textured, every scene brimming with imagination.
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The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was a breakthrough for the director; while not his first feature, having worked on Digimon: The Movie and the sixth installment of the One Piece films before that, this was the real beginning of the styles and themes that he’s carried throughout his work ever since. A loose sequel to Yasutaka Tsutsui’s novel of the same name, the film follows Makoto Konno, the niece of the book’s protagonist, as she discovers her ability to literally leap through time.
The film feels spiritually connected to the work of another anime master: Satoshi Kon. Like Kon does with the protagonist Chiyoko in his film Millennium Actress, Hosoda links Makoto’s transitions between the past and present with one fluid motion, connecting her leap from the present to her (often inelegant) landing in the past with a single cut. As her aunt explains, “time itself doesn’t go back: it was you who went back”, and film’s animation embodies this idea of time travel is a physical act. Also like Millennium Actress, reality and memory blend together until they become indistinguishable from one another. The most important thing is the emotions that connect the dimensions.
While it’s pretty high concept, the stakes remain low for the most part, as Makoto mainly uses time travel to pursue fairly trivial matters — whether its getting a quiz right at school, or giving herself the ability to perform 10 hours of karaoke, plus any other decadence that a teenager can think of.
