10 great Japanese time-travel films

At the 48th edition of the Japan Academy Film Prize (also known as the Japanese Academy Awards), the big winner was A Samurai in Time (2023) from writer-director Jun’ichi Yasuda, which picked up best film. The low-budget feature has not only been a major awards triumph in Japan but a financial one too, passing the 1 billion yen mark at the domestic box office. Yasuda’s movie is an indie success story, but it’s also just one recent example of inspiration and innovation concerning the device at the film’s centre: time travel.

With animated blockbusters like Your Name (2016) and Mirai (2018) and a wave of independent films making a splash at home and internationally, Japanese filmmakers across the last decade, in particular, have made commercial and critical hits out of creative approaches to time travel – whether their characters are people stuck in time loops, separated romantics trying to reach each other across timelines, or a child meeting past and future versions of his family.

If you go back through the decades (without the need for a time machine), Japan has long delivered some of the more fascinating, technically ambitious and thrilling time-travel stories, across very different genres. The particular mode of A Samurai in Time is a fish-out-of-water comedy that successfully swerves into existential drama, as an Edo period samurai is struck by lightning and transported to mid-2000s Japan, finding work as a stunt performer in TV dramas depicting the era from which he came.

Director: Kosei Saito

Once released in the west as the heavily trimmed Time Slip, Kosei Saito’s curio sees a squadron of Japanese Self-Defense Force soldiers get transported to their country’s warring states era, when rival clans were battling to become the supreme Shogun. Theorising that disrupting history enough might send them back to their time before the damage settles, the troops join in the war effort for one clan with their machine guns, helicopter and tank, as Sonny Chiba’s lieutenant forms a bromance with Isao Natsuyagi’s feudal lord.

While the pricey-looking production fully delivers on the bloody spectacle potential of Showa-era weaponry versus samurai, what lingers most is the real wrestling with the darkness of the premise. Given the opportunity to visit a less enlightened period, these modern soldiers descend into madness, bloodlust and depravity – including rape and pillaging – within days, as though they’ve been granted permission to act on psychological urges they’d been suppressing. No one comes out of this a hero.

Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi

This is one of many adaptations of a popular 1967 novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui (also the author of Paprika, adapted by Satoshi Kon in 2006). It follows a teenage girl who accidentally acquires time-travelling powers, which leads to a time loop where she keeps reliving the same day and dilemmas.

As is becoming more evident with increasing Western distribution for his extensive back catalogue, director Nobuhiko Obayashi had a knack for disorientating visual passages that feel like full-on reinventions of the possibilities and logic behind special effects in cinema, well beyond just the gonzo imagery of his most famous film, House (1977). Such examples in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time are relatively sparse until one key set piece towards the end. The extended time-travel sequence in question is a truly innovative feat of animation, superimposition and expressionistic montage, so overwhelming in conveying the heightened emotions of its desperate protagonist that it reaches transcendence.

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Although one of several canonical spin-off films to be released while the 1980s TV adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi’s manga was still airing, Beautiful Dreamer is an accessible, largely standalone entry in the hugely popular sci-fi comedy franchise – though it may take newcomers a few minutes to work out why a group of foolish high-school students have access to a tank. And how and why the lead boy has a superpowered, alien girlfriend who favours wearing tiger-striped bikinis and go-go boots.

Those quirks are all just dressing for the real meat to chew on in this steadily haunting and profound time-loop story, wherein a depleting number of last survivors in a disappearing world reckon with their fate being controlled by an unknown person’s dreams. Despite all the prevalent gags about horny teenagers, the film’s philosophical underpinnings definitely display seeds of the artist who would go on to direct Angel’s Egg (1985) and Ghost in the Shell (1995).

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Things are weird in Shinya Tsukamoto’s micro-budget film even before a working time machine is introduced with little explanation or fanfare. The teenage title character has a big metal pylon growing out of his back, which makes him the target of bullying classmates. He’s soon got more challenging competitors to face, though, after being propelled 25 years into the future, where the world is under threat by a cult of vampires working on an artificial cloud system that will cloak the planet in permanent darkness.

Despite sounding like it’s probably based on a wacky 1980s cyberpunk anime, The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo was actually first a play of Tsukamoto’s that he wanted to preserve in recorded form. Shot on Super 8, the mid-length feature lays groundwork for the director’s transhumanist breakthrough Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), especially in its production design and hyperkinetic editing rhythms, though with an ultimately more optimistic climax for its dystopian vision.

Director: Takashi Miike

In a prolific career filled with ruminations on violence and stylistically bold offerings, Izo may well be Takashi Miike’s most consistently violent and delirious work. It opens with the torture and crucifixion of a real-life 19th-century assassin, Izo Okada (Kazuya Nakayama). Rather than dying, however, Izo’s body and spirit are launched across multiple points in time: mostly into the future, sometimes back into the past, occasionally a fusion of the two. Single-minded in his rage, the feral Izo enacts a slaying streak across centuries, his victims including gun-wielding SWAT teams, innocent children and guest star Takeshi Kitano as a possible god of time in a boardroom. It’s all quite vague.

Miike’s cosmic oddity fully embraces the surreal from its opening minutes, which include imagery of conception and childbirth leading into a hyperactive montage of brutality and war across 200 years. If there’s anything resembling a clear message in this temporal thriller, it’s that the history of the world repeats itself, and not for the better.

Director: Katsuyuki Motohiro

If the modern Japanese time-travel story in film and television has a defining auteur, it’s almost certainly screenwriter Makoto Ueda, who penned three entries on this list. Dating back to the 2001 stage play of the same name, Ueda’s scripts have explored the existential and comic possibilities of time-travel tales in both live-action and animation – his anime credits include the miniseries The Tatami Galaxy (2010) and Tatami Time Machine Blues (2022), based on novels by Tomihiko Morimi.

The film adaptation of Summer Time Machine Blues is a delightful slacker comedy, following in the footsteps of Bill and Ted by seeing what would happen if the least ambitious characters imaginable were granted access to mind-melting abilities. When a working time machine suddenly appears in the base of a university science-fiction club, the best use that the hapless members can imagine is to travel back one day into the past to steal the remote control for their clubhouse’s air conditioning unit before it was broken.

Director: Mamoru Hosoda

A wildly different though equally wonderful take on the same concept as the 1983 film of the same name listed above, Mamoru Hosoda’s movie is in fact a standalone sequel to Yasutaka Tsutsui’s source novel. The protagonist of the book and the Obayashi film appears as the mysteriously knowledgeable aunt of this anime’s new lead character, 17-year-old Makoto Konno.

This time around, the teenage girl journeys to the past at will, rather than being caught in a loop, and Makoto’s power to travel back is activated through literally leaping. At first, she uses her abilities for personal benefits and frivolous pursuits, like acing exams and repeating karaoke for 10 hours. It’s when Makoto attempts to prevent undesirable situations and puppeteer other people’s lives, even under the guise of benevolence, that her emotional immaturity becomes dangerous – especially when she realises too late that there’s a limit to how many times she can leap.

Director: Junta Yamaguchi

The second film on this list written by Makoto Ueda, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has proved one of the major Japanese indie success stories of recent years. Part of that is due to the microgenre it belongs to, alongside fellow cult sensation One Cut of the Dead (2017): nagamawashi films, in which the entire story is seemingly filmed in one single, unbroken shot – appropriately enough for a time-travel tale, you’d have to revisit Junta Yamaguchi’s movie multiple times to pinpoint the barely perceptible cuts.

Filmed over just seven nights, this intricate, lively comedy sees a café worker, Kato (Kazunari Tosa), discover that the PC monitor in his bedroom is projecting a video transmission from himself in the future, but only two minutes ahead and seemingly from the café TV downstairs. In investigating, Kato unwittingly performs actions described by his future self, and soon recruits his clueless colleagues to try stretching how far forward they can view the café’s upcoming events.

Director: Junta Yamaguchi

It’s bad enough to be in a Groundhog Day scenario at all, let alone if your time loop traps you in the worst situation possible: your stressful job. Director Ryo Takebayashi made a charming comedy out of this idea with Mondays: See You ‘This’ Week! (2022), in which office workers are forced to repeat the same high-pressure week. In River, Yamaguchi and Ueda’s beautifully orchestrated follow-up to Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, repetitive routines increase their torture thanks to an even more restrictive time window of – you guessed it – two minutes.

Plagued by a time loop isolated to a riverside tourist town, hospitality workers and guests retain their memories across every reset, so they can strategise their escape together. The trouble is enacting any plan when each jump back in time transports them all to the exact spot they were in when the loop first started, meaning that each two-minute repeat – filmed in impressive unbroken takes – involves mad dashes across town just to speak to one another.

Director: Shinji Araki

Time-loop films often focus on themes of bettering oneself or forming camaraderie to improve your circumstances and perspective. Changing one’s mind about how to approach life is definitely a key factor in Penalty Loop, but it’s born from questions of how to approach death. Shinji Araki’s psychological drama explores not only the idea of going through with deliberately taking a life, but whether, given the chance, you could keep taking that same life over and over.

The tense opening sees protagonist Jun (Ryuya Wakaba) follow and covertly murder a man (Yusuke Iseya) whose body he throws into a lake. But upon waking the next morning, he finds himself back at the start of the previous day. The man he murdered, who we soon learn apparently killed Jun’s girlfriend, is alive again. No matter how many times Jun enacts revenge, the loop won’t end. And the target is also retaining memories of his repeated murder.