A nine-year-old girl named Shinko Aoki grew up hearing her grandfather's tales of life a thousand years ago, and is able to vividly see the past.

Back then, a princess named Nagiko Kiyohara lived in the same village, at a time when the area was known as the province of Suō and its capital Kokuga.

Shinko invites Kiiko Shimazu, a new student who has recently transferred to her school, with her to her vivid imaginings of the past.

Along with the local village boys, Shinko and Kiiko form a group known as the Destiny Squad, whose leader is 14 year-old Tatsuyoshi.

The group explores the village, including building a dam for a fish in the creek, which seemingly represents their bond and hopes for the future.

Shortly afterward, Tatsuyoshi's father, a police officer, hangs himself after gambling away a neighbor's money with a woman.

Shinko and Tatsuyoshi go off late at night to find the woman and punish her, ending up in the village's dark side riddled with crime.

In the distance, Princess Nagiko and her friend sit on a stone, enjoying the friendship that Shinko and Kiiko helped them create.

Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau of the French-language online magazine Panorama-cinéma said, "Both films chronicle childhood adventures and the "magic" that resides in this naive outlook.

"[27] San Francisco International Animation Festival programmer Sean Uyehara said (interviewed by Elisabeth Bartlett of Fest21.com) mentioned this film in the light of Miyazaki's oft used focus upon pre-adolescence, "that moment when kids are figuring out their personality, how they fit in socially, feelings of empathy, how to deal with anger and disappointment...They are starting to understand how they affect others and others affect them.

In the film, the princess of the Heian era, "a girl their age whose face they cannot yet visualize, remains isolated in her parallel universe as Katabuchi inventively leaps timeframes.

"[30] With this added perspective, Katabuchi's storytelling skills enable him "to layer an aura of postwar disillusionment without disturbing the pic's well-sustained innocent tone.

Chris Knipp thought the most appealing and fascinating about the film was "the way it oscillates between the real and the imaginary, the upbeat and the sad, while maintaining the deceptively simple surface of childhood."

On the large scale, Katabuchi's film depicts Japan of the '50s, "caught between an imperial past of rigid class distinction and its Western-influenced, caste-loose future," and it presents "two sides of an ambivalent East/West fusion, conveyed with surprising clarity.

"[29] And on the personal level, we find that nothing is cast in stone forever, as real-life events affect the main characters right up to the end.