Unfortunately, I am not really sure of how accurate that summary was. And this is not due to me hardly remembering the movie (which I kinda wish was the case) or it having a very complex plot, making it hard to give a decent explanation of it within such a brief paragraph. Instead, I have to put the blame on what seems to be the this title’s largest shortcoming - it’s a complete and utter mess.
This is a little surprising, seeing that Colorful doesn’t bring up a whole lot of characters or themes, but it still manages to continuosly forget about the ones it did thgoughout its duration. As a result, the movie ends up with a line-up of people who are not only not given any kind of development, but are left halfway through their exposition when the ending credits roll in.
The only character which I felt was decently introduced and deserved their place in Colorful was Saotoma. His subplot seems to be the one that actually pushes the protagonist and the plot into some kind of direction, too bad it takes place exlusively within the last one-third of the movie. As a result, we are left wondering what is even the whole point of it throughout the rest of the time. Although, to be frank, I’m still not 100% sure about what it was even now.
To give you a better example of how severely Colorful lacks any kind of focus, let’s talk about some more adult-like themes it throws at the viewer. And there are at least two big ones, namely betrayal and prostitution. I won’t go into details to avoid spoilers, but if you watch it expecting some kind of an actual look into those issues, you’ll come out dissapointed. It’s a bit like virtue signaling, except the authors don’t even have balls to actually condemn those sorts of behaviours, they just throw them into vacuum and never do anything with them. Maybe this was an attempt to make the movie seem more edgy and appeal to certain types of demographic, but instead it came out totally out of place.
However, the absolute cherry on top when it comes to lack of direction in Colorful was the moment when its creators realised they forgot to actually put its keynote into it. To fix it, they decided to make the protagonist blurt it out in the middle of the dialogue with barely no context, while the person they were talking to just nods silently, listening to an explanation of the movie’s title. Unfortunately, I cannot bring myself to fully hate this moment, because while the MC was talking, his school’s graduation song was also playing in the background and I happen to have a particular weakness to those. In the end, I had a very weird moment of contrast, when the worst and the best thing I was able to hear throughout this movie both happened simultaniously.
Speaking of contrast, this words also deserves its place when talking about Colorful’s visuals. I definetely have to apploud the backgrounds - while they’re not quite on Shinkai’s levels, they are still really well made, vivid and detailed. On the opposite side, the character designs are pretty poor, even scruffy. Their animation is even worse, especially when it comes to walking or running, which seems very sluggish and at times the framerate for it is really low. You can really tell the difference between the level of detail put into those respective aspects and the overall impression is similiar to a poor green screen effect.
I was hoping the whole mess in the direction would eventually be given some kind of explanation, but in the end all of it was left to my own imagination. Was the movie trying to be an elaborate metaphore of our own lives, which can be very chaotic as well? Unfortunately, this is but a poor excuse for the Colorful’s very apparent issues and I can’t bring myself to handle it to it.
The ending doesn’t help much either. Instead of leaving me with a good final impression, it brings the exact same resolution I was guessing would happen six minutes into the damn thing. And to make it even worse, it gives hardly any explation as to how the protagonist was able to solve the puzzle, making it even less satisfying than I was expecting.
All in all, watching Colorful was but a waste of time. I might end up being a bit salty about it, seeing that is was the first anime I decided to watch in the new year 2018, but the rating I decided to handle it is what I give to series that might have some pros to it, but are largely overshadowed by their cons. I believe this is what constitues as a fair judgement for this movie.
