Time waits for noone.

It's a common refrain through Mamoru Hosoda's first original film. (OK, it's not strictly original, being based on a novel, but this helps distinguish it from the one piece film and digimon short films he made beforehand). It's a phrase a lot of the characters seem confused by. It's unclear if this is because it's in English, or if it's because they're teenagers and aren't really comfortable with the passage of time yet. That's kind of the point, of course.

As The Girl Who Leapt Through Time ages, though, it has taken on something of a different meaning. The film came out in 2006, when I was but 12 years old. The characters use gorgeous keitai phones. Makoto, Chiaka and Kousuke play baseball in the summer heat. Yuri and Koho harbour secret crushes in the schoolyard. Crickets chirp in the evenings.

It's nostalgic.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the first anime I ever watched that wasn't Pokemon, Digimon or Beyblade. I was 15, going through a puberty I didn't want, in a brand new relationship with a girl I liked a lot. We sat in her living room and she showed me this film, this gorgeous, pale-hued dream of a summer half the world away, the winter's bite chased away by that haze on the screen. I fell in love immediately.

A lot of Hosoda's magic is taking a high-concept premise, but then using it to find the magic in the mundane. Makoto is a time traveller, but she's a daft one, using her leaps to eat a pudding, to catch pitches, to avoid an awkward confession. She's an everygirl, unburdened with responsibility, her whole life ahead of her to try over and over again. She's everything I wished I could be, then. I didn't know why I identified so much with her. I guess I do now.

We broke up soon after. I still don't really know why - I was probably too immature, or maybe she knew there was something wrong with me that I wouldn't work out myself for another half decade. But the film stuck with me, and every rewatch takes me back to that winter evening. Our first kiss had only been a few days prior - my very first - and I still wasn't sure how to handle being a 'boyfriend.' I mean, I still don't, that's why nowadays I'm a girlfriend. But Makoto's love resonated through me like a tuning fork, that pure love that for a long time you think can only happen on screen and in books. She promises to come running for Chiaki, to find him through time himself. I wondered what it felt like to know you'd chase someone to the ends of the Earth like that.

I'm lucky enough to know that love, now.

I always come out of a Hosoda film with a renewed appreciation of the beauty of the world. They're beautiful stories, but they're also films that obsess over both natural and man-made majesty. The flowers and the bees. A tower of clouds. The diffused sunlight through a classroom window. A level crossing. It makes the world you live in feel so much more bright.

There's a line, from The End of Evangelion, one that never fails to make me cry. It's the same sentiment as this, this reverence for the world around us, that we should take time, every day, to truly see that beauty. "As long as there is the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth... it'll all work out."

Our world gets harder and harder to live in, every day. I spend so much of my time worrying, whether it's over people I love in America, terrorised by a regime that grows more terrifying by the hour, or whether it's at home, living as I am on TERF island. But works like this, art about normal people just doing their best... It reminds me we can all do that, too.

I feel honoured to have seen this film in the cinema. I often feel like that, seeing films that I didn't or couldn't see in theatres the first time around. I think the cinema is kind of a sacred place, I guess. It makes a movie whole, complete.

Time waits for noone. So we should make the most of it while we still can. To everyone out there who might need it - and everyone who doesn't, too. I love you. It'll all work out.