Note: If the picture above looks pixellated to you, congratulations! You’re having the same problem as me and I haven’t the foggiest idea why this happened. orz Click on the image to view a full-sized, high-quality, non-****ed-up version. Now, on with the show.

Your friendly Wolf Hurricane DVD critic is back from a long hiatus with a piping-hot review of Kadokawa/Bandai’s limited-edition R1 DVD release of the 2006 animated film Toki o Kakeru Shoujo (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time).

STORY

The next bit is a copy-and-paste from a review of the film that I wrote last year.

Konno Makoto is an ordinary high school girl in Tokyo. She has an ordinary family, lives in an ordinary – albeit rather attractive – house, has two normal friends and attends an ordinary school where nothing extraordinary usually happens.

Nothing, that is, except on one particular day when our heroine has a run of extremely bad luck. After a surprise exam in her first class, a disastrous attempt at tempura-frying and an incident in which a fat bloke is sent flying straight at her, Makoto ends her day having to march a heavy stack of papers up to a science classroom. As she deposits her load on a table, she looks up at the chalkboard and notices something scribbled in a blank area next to some scientific equations:

Time waits for no one.

Makoto hears a noise in the adjoining lab and goes to investigate. There’s no one inside, but she notices a small object lying on the floor. As she bends over to pick it up, someone enters the room. Startled, Makoto trips and falls on her back – and suddenly her head is filled with strange visions of flying through space, water, Van Goghesque scenes and a weird futuristic landscape . . .

And then she’s back on the floor of the science lab. Later that day, Makoto pushes the incident to the back of her head as she enjoys an afternoon game of “baseball” (read: passing a ball around) with her friends Chiaki and Kousuke. Afterwards, she hops on to her bike and speeds off to deliver a bag of fruit to her aunt before going home.

As her bike rolls down a steep hill towards a level crossing, red lights start to flash and alarms go off: two trains are fast approaching. Makoto applies the brakes – only to find out that they’re not working. The bike hits the barrier and flips over, sending her straight into the path of one of the trains, and in the last few moments before impact she reflects on what she would have done differently had she known that she would die that day. The train slams into the bike, which instantly disintegrates into a shower of fragmented steel – and Makoto . . .

. . . opens her eyes to find her bike intact and a woman demanding an apology for crashing into her side. Makoto looks down the road and sees the level crossing barriers just starting to come down, then the trains thundering across – and wonders to herself: How?

For the benefit of those who haven’t seen the film, I’ll stop here before we stray into major spoiler territory. A full synopsis is available here.

PACKAGING

The LE boxset’s two DVDs are packaged in thinpak cases with jackets featuring background shots from the film (above).

Both discs and the soundtrack CD are housed in a sturdy book-type artbox (front and back shown above and below; interior shown in the very first image above). The manufacturers rate a hearty thumbs-up from me for this excellent container, which offers more protection than a standard slipcase or open-sided artbox but has a sleeker, more practical design than the horizontally-oriented “gated” artboxes that we’ve seen in previous Kadokawa/Bandai LE releases. (To be fair, a book-type artbox wouldn’t have worked well for keeping a multi-volume series like Lucky Star unless thinpaks were employed.)

SOUNDTRACK

Included with the LE boxset is a fifteen-track CD (above) containing the music used in Toki o Kakeru Shoujo. This bonus item is what ultimately convinced me to part with a few extra dollars and get the high-end version instead of the single-disc regular edition, chiefly because the score left a good impression on me when I first saw the film and I was eager to listen to it all over again.

The soundtrack makes for easy, enjoyable listening, offering a good range of styles from the lightly dramatic (Summer Night) to the timeless (extracts from Bach’s Goldberg Variations), from the contemplative (Memory of the Future) to the mysterious (Silence). A personal favourite of mine is the brief, cheerful slice-of-life track Sketch, which is now a key part of my iPod morning-walk canon.

DVD CONTENTS

Disc 1 contains the main feature and a handful of extras, including the following:

The main feature can be played with a running commentary delivered by director Hosoda Mamoru and the seiyuu who provided the voices for the three main characters. This is in addition to the usual set-up options: audio in English 5.1 or Japanese 5.1; optional English subtitles for signs/text and dialogue or for signs/text only.

The real bells and whistles are in the second disc, which has the following contents:

The “main feature with storyboards” consists of a dual-window setup where the finished film plays with full audio in a window on the centre-left part of the screen while matching scenes from the storyboard are shown in a smaller window on the lower right-hand side. This feature can be played with or without an audio commentary provided by Hosoda Mamoru (director), Ito Toshihiko (assistant director) and Aoyama Hiroyuki (animation director).

IMPRESSION

I reviewed Toki o Kakeru Shoujo over a year ago, so I won’t dwell on the merits of the film itself. My views on the story, voice acting, animation quality and other technical details are set out in the review linked above. (In summary: an engaging film with excellent production values; a definite must-watch.) For this post, I shall concentrate on the physical product – the limited-edition boxset – produced by Kadokawa/Bandai for the film’s Region 1 DVD release.

The R1 licensors have had a fair bit of experience assembling “special edition” sets for the collecting public. Their efforts to date have not been consistently good: while last year’s Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu LE package came with an excellent mix of extra treats that more than made up for the higher price tag, this year’s high-end roll-out of Lucky Star was bloated and overpriced. Fortunately for them (and for us!), their R1 version of Toki o Kakeru Shoujo tips the spotty track record back into positive territory with its leaner, more focused approach to the high-end DVD game. Apart from the artbox – which in any case is de rigueur for all LE sets – there are no physical extras like T-shirts or shitajiki. What the price premium nets you is an extra features-laden DVD and the film’s memorable soundtrack: the sort of bells and whistles I like to call “hmm-hmm extras”, as opposed to frivolous “ooh-aah extras” like chocolate-cornet-shaped screen wipes. (For “hmm-hmm”, imagine any anime character – I’m thinking of Chidori right now for some reason – nodding approvingly with a simple “hmm-hmm” to signal their agreement.) These extras are quite sufficient, in my view, to justify the US$20 difference between the LE and RE price tags – and it’s worth bearing in mind that the difference can be as narrow as US$10 or so, depending on which retailer one orders the set from.

All things considered, this LE release gets high marks for its focused, well-designed treatment of an excellent animated film. Highly recommended.

LINKS (beware of spoilers!)
Amazon – product page
Anime News Network – encyclopedia article / links to retailers
Wikipedia – encyclopedia article

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Anime, Reviews.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.