111: Animation Double Feature! - "The Triplets of Belleville" & "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"

We know it's been awhile since we covered an animated film.  This week we make it up to you by covering two brilliant animated films (psst - not from the US, shhh).

Starting out with a heart-breaker from France and ending up leaping through time in Japan in a way Sam Beckett never imagined!

Check out our reviews of The Triplets of Belleville and The Girl who Leapt Through Time!

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Comments

[Michelle Denise Norton]

Thanks for stepping away from the carnage for a week ; ) Triplets of Bellville does create an amazing visual vocabulary for its universe. I agree that that's the real trick to not landing in the uncanny valley. Animation that tries to duplicate sunlight -- fail; animation that finds a mood and lets it inform the movie -- score. I did find the song catchy though. Try singing it a few times, it might haunt you...FOREVER (cue shambling undead French jazz singers).

And now I need to track down a copy of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time because I want to watch it again. I had a similar sense of initial surprise at how much I liked it while not being entirely sure why. You just start rooting for the main character. The sense of the possibility of real consequences as well as the way the movie lets you gradually figure out the time travel ramifications took the plot to a level where I really appreciated the care put into the script and plotting.

[Kristen]

Yay, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time! Will the animated version be followed up with the live-action version? (Say no. I found it incredibly disappointing in the end.)

[Steve Nordquist]

Meh, it's not like discovering RAW (naught to do with wrestling; debuted Maus among others) when you've been reading Dark Horse Presents or DC looking for what makes the edgy bits. Still, _Triplets_ has the trope where silence lets your viewer's most Ayahuasca-fueled confirmation biases lead; so you can watch it right after a draught of _Escaflowne_ (also Sony Classics' distribution in the US, I think) or _Fushigi_ -anything- and do well even suffering multiple viewings because of course those fridge coils still won't vacuum themselves and sometimes you just have to write a proxy server for the Jamendo box.

I find I can remember _Toki no Kaku Shoujo_ (vs. _Shoujo Kakumei Utena_, esp. the movie) robustly, so it has better replay value hands down over say, _Onegai Teacher_, which by the time it has led you on with innuendo for 26 ep. will (or should) have you all through with the innocence stuff. It's all about the fan ephemera.
www.uk-anime.net%2Fanime%2FTime_Traveller%3A_The_Girl_Who_Leapt_Through_Time_(Live_action).html
The live action series...really a sequel...is 6-ep. BD with CG travel interstitials.
Or say, 873 percent more charitably reviewed:
http://atemporarydistraction.com/2011/05/dvd-review-time-traveller-the-girl-who-leapt-through-time/
Should people not be sourcing these things through film festivals rather than Amazon (which is good enough for Library Genesis links, mind.) Mawaru Penguindrum does a good job of following the dictate that time travel in Japan is done via the Apple Store (or rather, through the matte universally defined for digital media consumption in old Asia (Singapore being new.) Surely it's more charitable to call time travel a white space function, than open the ark from the cantor side and have the hero rebut decades of rhinovirus infections with electrical arcs and some facial rictus?