Regrets, They Have a Few

Two animated features from the mid-2000s are returning to the shelves in fresh new 4K editions, and really, I couldn’t be happier. Not just because The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride are genuinely great movies, but because they’ve been brought back to disc in splendid new restorations by people who seem to truly care about preserving their achievements.

Let’s start with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the 2006 breakthrough from Mamoru Hosoda, the Japanese anime master who’s built an increasingly ambitious filmography over the last couple of decades, culminating in genre-bending material like Mirai and Belle. His latest, Scarlet, premiered at Venice earlier this month, and in advance of its November release GKids and Shout! Studios have been reissuing his earlier work in 4K editions.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is almost naïve by comparison to what Hosoda’s doing nowadays, but naïve doesn’t have to mean simple. It’s the story of ordinary teenager Makoto (voiced by Riisa Naka), who discovers she has the ability to propel herself backward in time, and uses it the way any teen would – avoiding accidents, never being late for school, delivering the perfect karaoke performance, that sort of thing.

But improving her fortunes means the people around Makoto don’t get to have their own best moments – including her lovelorn friend Chiaki (Takuya Ishida), whose torch for her isn’t even the biggest secret he’s hiding.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time springs from a 1967 YA novel by Yatsutaka Tsutsui – which involved a specific time loop as well as time travel, making it feel like even more of a predecessor to Groundhog Day than this adaptation. (Technically Hosoda’s film is a sequel to the book, but you don’t need to be familiar with the source text to enjoy the film; I certainly wasn’t.)

The central themes of maturity and responsibility are evergreen, after all: Growing up means understanding you can’t always fix your mistakes, but you can take responsibility for them. Or, to paraphrase a favorite philosopher: No matter when you go, there you are.

Now, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride only moves in one direction, but its hero has plenty to regret.

See, Victor – voiced, of course, by Johnny Depp –was supposed to be marrying Victoria (Emily Watson), a perfectly nice young woman whose family connections will secure Victor’s future and give his grasping parents the social status they crave. But a moment of pre-wedding jitters leaves him betrothed to the resurrected Emily (Helena Bonham-Carter) instead.

It’s not a total nightmare; Emily is sweet and funny and kind, and as passionate about music as Victor. But she is a zombie, and her engagement to Victor brings the worlds of the living and the dead into direct contact, with potentially disastrous results for everyone. (Well, mostly the living. The dead will be fine.)

Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton’s involvement with this project was more conceptual than hands-on; though he shares directorial credit with Nightmare animator Mike Johnson, his contributions seem mostly aesthetic – designing the characters, consulting on the production design, and tapping friends and family to do the voices and the music.

This is not a complaint, mind you; I’d argue Corpse Bride is one of the best things to bear Burton’s name since the mid-1990s, a tangled and pleasantly hectic story geared more to adults than children, despite its playful design; Victor, Emily and Victoria all have distinct personalities and complicated desires, and the love triangle that forms between them is taken reasonably seriously.

The film looks beautiful, its visual palette forming a bridge between the woodcut tones of Sleepy Hollow and the charcoal Gothic of Sweeney Todd; the voice actors are perfectly suited to their characters, with support from Paul Whitehouse and Tracey Ullman as Victor’s parents, and Albert Finney and Joanna Lumley as Victoria’s. Other key roles are voiced by Michael Gough, Richard E. Grant, Jane Horrocks, Christoper Lee and composer Danny Elfman, who kinda runs off with the picture as a skeletal musician named Bonejangles. Because of course he is.

Warner’s new 4K disc is built around a beautiful new 2160p/24 presentation of the feature, with remixed Dolby Atmos audio, and if you’re impressed with the quality of these screen grabs your eyes may well pop out when you see them with the additional depth and color offered by HDR. Corpse Bride was the first stop-motion feature to be shot with DSLR cameras, allowing the animators to get closer to the puppets than was previously possible, and the 4K upscale of the 2K digital intermediate is breathtaking.

The 5.1 isolated score track included on the DVD and Blu-ray editions didn’t make it onto this release, but the production featurettes are all here, offering brief looks at the production and visits with Burton, Danny Elfman, the voice actors, the animators and designers and fabricators and a still gallery of pre-production imagery.

Warner’s also reunited producer Allison Abbatte, screenwriter John August and co-director Mike Johnson for two new retrospective featurettes, “Digging Up the Past: The Minds Behind Corpse Bride” and “Til Death Do Us Art: A Corpse Bride Reflection,” which amount to about 15 minutes of pleasant reminiscences and archival footage, each of them ending with a mention of how great it is to have the film out on 4K. I get it, I really do.

There are no new special features on Shout! Studios and GKids’ new 4K release of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time; the audio commentary and storyboard version on the companion Blu-ray were produced for an earlier Bandai Entertainment disc. They are, however, really good, allowing Hosoda and his cast and crew to explore their collaboration at length. The audio commentary lets Hosoda and voice actors Naka, Ishida and Mitsutaka Itakura discuss the movie’s layered themes through the lens of character, and the storyboard version of the feature is accompanied by its own optional commentary from Hosoda, animation director Hiroyuki Aoyama and assistant director Tomohiko Ito. (Shout’s disc doesn’t include the music video or premiere footage from previous releases, however.)

Neither of the commentary tracks made it onto the 4K platter, which is entirely devoted to a lovely 4K presentation of the film, with the original Japanese soundtrack and English dub both presented in Dolby TrueHD 5.1. It looks brand new, its hand-drawn characters and mixed-media backgrounds presented without a single speck or blemish; it’s as though someone had reached back through the decades to pull a pristine print into the scanner.

Obviously that wasn’t how it was achieved, and GKids and Shout deserve all the credit for what was clearly a complex restoration. But it looks like no one touched it but the original artists, which is all anyone could hope for. Take a moment to savor the sunset, and look forward to whatever’s coming next.

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is available this Tuesday, September 30^th, in a 4K edition from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment; it's also available in a collectible steelbook. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time arrives October 7^th in a 4K/Blu-ray combo steelbook from Shout! Studios.

Up next: Canadian International Pictures restores another lost classic, and Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck arrives on disc. You’ll like it.