Melancholy and the infinite sadness
Warning: Full spoilers for Orange follow.
There’s a scene towards the end of Orange that stuck with me. Suwa initially blows off a night of hanging out on New Year’s Eve because he knows that if he were to go, he would feel inclined to tell Naho, his best friend Kakeru’s love interest, about how he feels about her. How he really feels. Up to this point in the anime, we know that Suwa shouldn’t do that—it would endanger their plan up until then. But as shows go, he ends up sprinting there and discovers a weeping, very-much alone Naho. He comforts her. Except in this timeline, he leaves out the bit about being in love with her. It’s heartbreaking, knowing how things would turn out if he confessed his own feelings (a relationship, marriage, and eventually a child), but he knows it’s the right thing to do. Kakeru’s happiness is the priority.
This is a good example of how citrus-y Orange can be. A show with sweet, good intentions, but with a tangy bite of sadness perpetually embedded into it. As we follow the journey of five friends who desperately try to change the future and save their friend Kakeru from his eventual suicide, we learn that such a task is not quite as simple as merely changing decisions.
Orange has a strong start, centering its focus on a tight-knit circle of friends who all receive letters from their future selves. They dodge events that their letters warn about, and unsuccessfully change others. By the middle of the series, Orange falls into an arbitrary routine where Naho must change something. She changes it and something good happens, but then something sad happens after it. Later, she’s too nervous to ever make a move. Kakeru’s smile slightly fades. Rinse, repeat.
Yet Orange did something rare. Where it could have fallen into lazy melodrama, it instead made me feel truly close to these characters. My heart ached for Suwa and his sacrifices. Where in the show’s timeline, he gave up his own future son with Naho, in hopes of Kakeru living out a happy life with her in his place. I rooted alongside Hagita, Takako, and Azusa as they supported Naho in her bid to showing Kakeru affection. And mostly, I saw a bit of myself in both Naho and Kakeru. Like Naho, sometimes doing your best and saying the “right” thing isn’t as easy as it seems. And with Kakeru, as he showed how grappling with personal tragedies and regrets can make you feel so helpless and small, so much so that it’s hard to live with. It’s soul-crushing.
Luckily, as the show stumbles into its final section of episodes, it returns to the heights of the beginning of the series, and even improves. In the penultimate episode’s opening, we see the reality where Kakeru did take his own life. We see the decisions that his friends successfully changed throughout the show, but this time as they had originally happened. Like as he trips during the relay race, or as he tells his city friends about his mom’s suicide, and they merely laugh it off thinking it was a just a joke. It’s these incidents that engrain the seeds of doubt into Kakeru’s existence, and make him feel unworthy of life.
I’m glad that Orange never took a route that made it seem like suicide was a magically preventable act because of friendship heroics. The show took a balanced and realistic approach—where depression lives with you, and it doesn’t go away. But with the right support, it alleviates, and becomes easier to live with. Kakeru ended his life in the alternate world because he didn’t think he had the support system of his friends and his grandmother. He felt like a burden, not like he was an actual part of them. He never felt like he mattered.
In the show’s timeline, Kakeru still has these thoughts, but because of the crews’ extra interferences, in the end he carries one last regret: that taking his own life would devastate all those around him. That’s the key change. Where Kakeru spent his life seeking an escape from his regrets, in the end, a regret is what ultimately saved his life. It’s still a long road ahead, but at least, Kakeru knows that his friends are there for him. He knows that they were thinking about him ten years in the future, long after he had already passed. Naho, Suwa, Hagita, Takako, Azusa, and his dear grandmother are all there for him. In the past, in the present, in the future. Always.
The Verdict
Orange is one of the best anime of the year. It made me laugh, cry, sometimes a mixture of both. Even in its few missteps, in terms of its slow pace or sometimes poor animation, I never felt bored enough to turn away. Orange luckily regained its footing quickly, and became the rare slice-of-life that didn’t rely on tragedy as a crutch. Its characters felt realistic and lifelike, like those within Neon Genesis Evangelion or Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, two other anime that strongly dealt with the topics of depression and grief at their core.
I can’t say that there were any characters that I didn’t enjoy seeing on my screen—though I do wish that Hagita was given a bit more time to shine by the end of things. Regardless, Orange is a worthwhile entry into the slice-of-life genre, and given that there was recently a movie spin-off announced, it’s likely going to resonate in the months to come.
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