Colorful (Movie)

This anime was a great discovery, a true hidden gem that I'm happy I was able to find. Colorful deals with very important themes such as depression, suicide or self-discovery through a brilliant narrative and with an incredible hardness but at the same time sweetness.

A film that is divided into two parts: the first hour and the second hour. The first hour is among the saddest things I've ever seen where, due to the protagonist's constant mistakes, we are faced with heartbreaking situations. But in the second part, the protagonist, Makoto, undergoes a profound change and thanks to the help of his first friend, he ... manages to repair the negative situations that he himself had created.

The plot has a very interesting premise and I loved this sort of two-part film that I explained in the previous paragraph. I also found the final twist really successful.

The characters are quite good, especially the protagonist, Makoto, who undergoes a nice evolution. Maybe I would have given a little more space to secondary characters who ultimately, in one way or another, play a fairly important role in Makoto's story. But it's a small thing.

I liked the soundtrack, with the right songs at the right time that made some scenes really beautiful.

Even the animation, despite some pretty bad CGI, is more than excellent. Furthermore, the CGI is only used a couple of times so it isn't very noticeable.

The themes covered are truly profound and I appreciated the underlying message regarding people's lives which does not just have one color but can have more.

Truly recommended.

I do not consider myself an authority or knowledgeable enough to comment on psychological issues, especially those pertaining to self-harm and/or suicide, (although watching isekai should count as a form of self harm). Furthermore, I don't think a story is worth more when it tries to tackle these issues. If anything, I view shows and movies purely as a form of entertainment. If there is no substance in the story and it's just preaching, I would consider it bad. For example, I don't think Grave of the Fireflies is a good movie just because it portrays war, but because it's effective as a movie in ... general. The portrayal is realistic, the characters act realistically, there is a story, a struggle, drama, conflict, etc.

With that out of the way, I do think Colorful is a decent movie. Not because it talks about a serious topic, but just as a movie in general. I thought the characters were interesting. The main struggle was also interesting and the way it was resolved was also pretty good. I like how it does not take an absurdly happy resolution, but instead settles for a more grounded and realistic one.

It does have its problems though. The movie was too slow a lot of the time with nothing happening. Furthermore, the "plot twist" was pretty predictable from the very start, but the movie pretends that it's a hidden secret and uses it to prolong the story. This might not be for everyone, but if you enjoy a more grounded, slow, simple drama then go for it. Do not expect a crazy story. Do not expect something that has a lot of activity, complexity or suspense.

(TLDR at the bottom, thanks for reading.)

Colourful manages too something that seems impossible, it is simultaneously to long and too short.

It's almost like the staff working made the film but the realised that the script and storyboards only cover an hour of screen time, so they decided to emphasise certain bit of the film to make it longer but only achieving making the overall pacing of the story was way longer than it needs to be. So even though this is a two-hour film, it barely achieves anything of value. It's one of those anime that is made so at the moment you think ... it is really profound and deep but when you end up thinking about it a few months later the only think about the film you can remember is the final few minutes. As I am writing this review I am having to go back and rewatch sections of the film because the only thing I remember from my initial viewing is criticisms that I made (and the opening and ending scenes), and when the most memorable part of a film is the reasons you don't like it that is when you realise something went horribly wrong.

The film starts with the rather effective hook of someone in the afterlife, a young boy, who is given the chance to relive his life and to prevent his own suicide. The overall directing of this scene is quite impressive. The camera is positioned in such a way that Purapura (the spirit guiding the souls of the dead) is always in the centre of the screen, his upbeat tone and boyish look clashing with the overall morbid nature of the scene, our main character (who we know nothing about) has his own voice muted and replaced by white words on a black background. The other souls represented by translucent 3d models in direct contrast to the 2d background and too Purapura who still takes up a large portion of the screen, the dichotomy between these models and 2d drawings is really effective at bringing across the uncanny nature of this scene. These entire few minutes, while impressive, probably hurt the overall experience as it puts the viewer's expectations higher than what the film can actually deliver.

But after this opening scene the film throws us directly into the life of Makoto and its liner through line all but disappears as the viewer ends up watching Makoto live his day-to-day life, his encounters with friends and school, his relationship with his parents, the stresses of finding a new school and other fairly typical events in someone's life. Since the main focus is meant to be on the life of Makoto it is more of a collection of a bunch of random scenes with only some of them contributing to the actual plot and themes of the film, you could cut out a good chunk of the scenes in the middle of the film, and it would really detract from the film. There isn't much of a plot to colourful, there is the whole idea of Makoto being reincarnated, but that is mostly you used in the start and end of the films with the actual meat of the experience being the interpersonal relationships between Makoto and the rest of the cast, the problem is that Makoto is just an annoying character. He is arrogant and rude and bairly has any characterisation that can make him appealing despite his personality, maybe this lack of characterisation is done to make him seem like a typical school boy, but it just is one of the many issues that makes the time spent watching the film unpleasant. He does develop as a character but all of his development is kept to the final quarter of the film, so while it is great that he does develop most of the film we are stuck with and annoying MC and his development isn't particular noteworthy as it is just him learning to be a better person. The rest of the cast aren't any better, a lot of the characters that are around Makoto's age are similarly annoying or just have some really lacklustre characterisation that they are just boring to watch because their entire purpose is to talk to Makoto about some random event. There is one scene in the middle of the film where Makoto and his friends skip school and just end up walking around the town and talking about the history of it (it's more of Makoto's friend talking at him, though). But this scene is a bit of a waste of time as all it does it prove Makoto has a friend and due to the naturalistic approach to voice acting the series takes all the characters sound extremely uninterested and the lack of anything else to spice the scene up (like a good ost, impressive directing or noteworthy animation) the whole scene is just boring and has no real place in the story, and for the over all length of the scene it barely impacts the actual film.

And after some heart-to-hearts between Makoto and his parents the film stumbles into its ending, where its entire message is made clear in an overly ham-fisted and preachy way, that people are multifaceted, you could even say that people are “colourful” and the film wants to make sure you understand this by saying it multiple times, the staff were trying so hard to make sure that the viewers understand this message that they have the big conclusion that the answer is spelled out right in the title. My main issue with this isn't the lack of subtlety or the obtuse nature that the film takes in preventing its themes, it's that it is fairly obvious to most people. We've spent our entire lives living around over people and learning that they aren't black and white or easy to fit into categories. In the anime community to outsiders it might look like we are one homogenous group but as you can see there are plenty of different types of people, you'd have to be colour-blind to think that life is not colourful and then for this film to come round like it has made some grand revelation on human nature just feels wrong, we already know what the film is trying to say so no matter what the film does say we already know these messages and then combined this with the lack of anything conclusive happening to Makoto just makes the ending sub-par.

Even with all of these issues, the film just isn't that entertaining.

TLDR: Too long with sup-par voice acting leading to a disappointing conclusion.