Orange - Reviews

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Pu33y's avatar
Nov 28, 2022

LORD HAVE MERCY! This is by far, on of my favorite animes of all time. The story was most likely made by god after smashing into each other for some little "fun".  The story goes over on how the future them sends them letters to save one of their friends from killing himself. It tells them how to save their friend by their actions, what they should do and not do to. It is really really sad with some very memorable moments. It does a really good job on depression and how it feels to have depression. It made me cry more then a couple of times. The characters are beatuifully written with their own personalities and it makes them seem like they could all be mcs, even though it feels as if they already are. Once again fuck actual reviewers on this website when this just for your opinion, stop rating it so critically when no one will care if you think its shit or not.

8.9/10 story
10/10 animation
10/10 sound
9.5/10 characters
7.8/10 overall
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iienmeiakl's avatar
Dec 7, 2017

Потенциально это очень хорошее и красивое аниме. НО

Периодически возникает ощущение, что из такой задумки можно было выжать больше. Если бы сценаристы не пытались объяснить технологию появления этих писем, а ребята не ухаживали бы за главным героем как за беременным. С одной стороны такой их опеке есть объяснение. С другой иногда выглядит излишне приторно.

И анимация несмотря на няшность слишком уж глаза большие.

Тем не менее рекомендую, вероятнее всего аниме вам понравится.

7/10 story
7/10 animation
5/10 sound
7/10 characters
8/10 overall
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drx89's avatar
Jun 30, 2021

If this were based on the finale alone, the score would be much higher. Unfortunately, Orange wobbles uncertainly towards a masterful conclusion.

Animation and Sound: I'll lump these together since its pretty standard, with a somewhat forgettable OP. The animation rarely gets a moment to shine, but is decent enough that it isn't distracting. 

Characters: Overall, the characters are solid, but it is what they go through that irks me more (but we'll get to that). The group of friends are a close bunch, with Kakeru, Naho and Suwa being the standouts. Their dynamic is great, both in the high school setting as well as the stuff in the future. The other three (Azu, Hagita and Takako) are also welcome additions to the witty writing in the fleeting but not uncommon comedic moments. There aren't really any other noticeable characters in the cast except for Ueda-senpai, who spends most of her time being the moustache-twirling villain in the way of Naho and Kakeru being together. She's fine as an antagonist, with great voice acting, and that goes for the rest of the cast as well. 

Story: The big thing that drags the story in Orange for me is the inconsitency. It is either really compelling and emotional (like the firework scene or the entirety of the finale) or it falls flat attempting to justify a weak reason for characters' actions or events happening (like the entire concept of sending the letter back in time). Take the athletic meet "arc", for example. It spends so much time focusing on information we already know of, like Kakeru telling his friends about his mother, of which both us and the friends are already privy to, and their reactions to the news only amplifies the issue. The final act of this arc revolves around the friends completing the relay race together and cheering on Kakeru. This is fine in itself, but it borders on being too happy and cheerful that it starts to become irritating. This arc is also the prelude to the conflict that originally drove Kakeru to suicide, and the big twist is that despite the letters warnings, Naho causes the argument for a second time.

However, this time the reasoning behind it feels so jarring, considering Kakeru has had his friends' support in the race earlier, switching back to being bitter about his mother and worrying about his grandmother feels like massive whiplash for a character that had already come to terms with those issues a few episodes earlier. It's thankful that the fallout of the argument sets up the finale well, and the finale itself is truly amazing. It's just so baffling to have a dip in logic for characters that seemed to already come full circle 3 episodes before the finale only to f*** it all up. 

Finale is on the level of Clannad After Story, though.

6/10 story
8/10 animation
7/10 sound
8/10 characters
6.5/10 overall
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doux's avatar
Sep 3, 2019

Anime Review #8 - Orange

[ Completed Anime on monday 19-09-02 ]

This anime truly hits different when you’re depressed because the feels in this one are kinda good when you're lonely as heeellllllll. Before we get into this, as per usual, this review will contain SPOILERS so like don’t read it if you’ve never seen the show okay cool thanks!!!! Let’s get into the review~

Before that, this isn’t a spoiler but if you’re currently watching the anime or you're thinking about watching it, you kind of have to push through the cringe and just get to episode 12 because everything will come together and make more sense. I was so close to just dropping the anime but episode 12 is more of what you’d expect from an anime about suicide. It shows you the dark suffering and pain behind someone you think is okay! Anyway that’s all.. I know it’s a bit weird since there's only 13 episodes and it took getting to episode 12 for me to realize,,, but that’s my two cents.

The plot: A young highschool girl named Naho receives a letter from herself from 10 years in the future. In this letter, the future Naho recounts her day-to-day-life and regrets from the past in order for the present Naho to rewrite her wrongs. Her biggest regret, and the focus of the story, was being unable to save her transfer student friend Kakeru who ends up commiting suicide the day after Valentine’s. In the present, Naho decides that she’ll do whatever she can in order to change the future so that Kakeru won’t meet the same fate as before + she kind of catches feelings for him so she can’t let him die lol! It’s found out later on that Naho’s friend group also received letters from their past selves and in order to achieve this, it was alluded to that their future selves sent their letters into the Bermuda Triangle since it’s theorized to be a black hole and somehow that black hole will end up sending their letters to their second-year selves back in April 2012. Lol kind of a strange process but it’s anime it doesn't have to be realistic..

Basic plot summary: A group of friends team up to save their ~secretly suicidal~ new friend!!!!

Main Character Time!!! *:・゚✧*:・゚✧

-Naho: kind mom friend who puts others and the happiness of her friends before herself. I liked her character. I wanted to like her character more, but she’s so darn cliche, defenseless, and sensitive in every episode it makes me dislike her a little bit lol. She’s your average romantic drama female lead in that she’s a klutzy, shy, prude girl who likes a boy but isn’t bold enough to say how she feels. She’s a cute character and all, I didn’t hate her or anything, just not my cup of tea when it comes to how I like my girlies lol. If it’s any consolation, her character design is cute <3

-Kakeru: suicidal boi (lol that’s my opening) transfer student from tokyo who plays soccer. Basically his whole character is he feels regret for not being able to prevent his mother’s death on the afternoon of the opening ceremony so he rides his bike in front of a speeding truck so that he apologize to his mother (this is his fate in the original timeline). He’s cute i really liked him at first but he’s not my fav boy or anything. He’s cute and all but flawed in that i find this actions a bit weird even though he’s suicidal throughout the whole anime, at some parts i just didn;t fuck with him. Idk the way he handles some stuff I'm uncomfortable but no ones perfect (expect allen from d.gray-man i love him he’s the best boy!) Lol I will admit though, if I were in his situation, it is a bit embarrassing for him since all of his friends already know all this deep and personal stuff about him that he never told them and because of this they ambush him a lot like ‘are you really okay?’.. Idk i guess I’d feel awkward too. Lowkey I might snap one day if everyone was constantly on my case like ‘dont over do it! Tell us how you feel! Are you okay?’ I'd be like leave me aloneeee dawg! But that's just me i guess lol i’m writing way too much for this okay ~moving on~

Other Characters I Enjoyed/Wanna Talk About!!!・:*:・゚☆

-Suwa: best boy in the show, very wholesome, thicc boi, muscled soccer king who has a crush on Naho but supports Naho with Kakeru in this timeline. He’s so good to Naho i see why in the other future they got married because that’s cute for them!! Kinda sad though that he’s just Naho’s second option after Kakeru kicks it :/ Ahh  he’s just so cute I lowkey wish he ended up with Naho in this world too but i guess it’s cute that Suwa wants Kakeru to be happy in this dimension so he’ll put Kakeru’s needs first since there is a version of himself who can be happy and live with Naho. Also I called it that he had a letter the whole time like Naho (ep 6 is when he tells her) because why else would he be #TeamNahoAndKakeru all of a sudden since we saw him married to her in the future so he had to have known. 

-Azusa: Feisty, fun, bread girlie !! She’s cute and I support her and Hagita’s little married couple gag. When her and Takako repeated asked Naho “Are you hiding something from us?” that’s how i knew that they too had received letters from their past selves. We love that. Anyway she’s a good side character lol.

-Takako: BIG top lesbian vibes! I liked her character! She take no shit and will cut a bitch who tries to fuck with her friends so we love that plus when that hag called her a ‘nasty bitch’ i was like yes queen own that title we nasty bitches today!!!! Also we stan the dyke haircut she’s rockin in the future ~lesbians unite~ <3

-Hagita: glasses character lol i really like him. he’s bad at running and him and Azu are cute plus he’s kinda just there and doesn’t do much but I like that. He’s kinda funny too and i highkey liked him better than mr depresso Kakeru over here LOL. if the show was about Hagita and Azu’s budding relationship rather than Kakeru and Naho’s, that’d be kinda cute!!! Anyway, good fun glasses character, we stan.

Rating/Overall Thoughts!!♩♪♩

Overall I rate this anime a 6.5. The plot wasn’t great or anything but I also didn’t hate it. The anime was good, the plot was intriguing, though the execution of it all could’ve been a bit better. In my unnecessary opinion, some of the scenes in this show are just too cringey for me… at times i even had to pause it just to cringe lol. I feel like anime always do that thing where a group of friends will simultaneously over laugh at a joke or situation when that shit wasn’t funny at all.. Lol i know most anime do this to show that they are friends and they laugh together and have fun :p but shits not funny. Plus in romantic dramas when the main characters are all blushy and nervous over every little thing it’s like hhh just be bold and start dating already psshh (but yeah yeah i know they have to have their build up but still it’s like GET TO tHE POINT ALREADY). 

One ~kind of~ critic that I have is about that anime narrative where the girl mc is defenseless and easily hurt just to be ‘rescued’ by a boy ..it’s kinda annoying and over done especially in this anime. For example, in ep 5 when Naho ‘hurts her hand’ just by whacking another girl’s hand away… like what?? is she made of glass??? how does that hurt??? ...and why does he cover her ‘injury’ with a bandaid??? i-- there was literally no blood…. Ah whatever man… anime writers must fuckin bust their nuts when they write shit like that into a slice of life highschool romantic drama so hey whatever gets those views don’t fix what ain't broke. And another thing, why are rom dram anime characters so damn clueless about love like ‘oo I wonder who likes me!? heheh idk i hope it's this guy who’s clearly into me<3 but i’m too ~shy~ to tell him my feelings because I'm scared he won’t feel the same way even though he does!!!! :(” maybe I'm being too harsh here, or maybe I’m preaching to the damn choir, but at the end of the day yeah, I’m just more of a ‘Shonen anime’ girlie than a ‘soft uwu fall in love with me senpai romantic drama’ girlie. 

I get on so many tangents but I’m also out here wondering why they hadn’t told one another that they’d all received letters from the future this whole time-- like i know Azu says she thinks it’s a joke at one point, but if they’d all received their letters on the opening ceremony, you’d think they’d texted in they group chat like yo wtf is one of you pranking me with this letter bullshit? And then they’d all of realized they each have letters! Like come on, they’re friends aren't they? If it were me (and I had friends) I’d tell them the INSTANT I received the letter and be like “yo look at this weird ass shit i found this morning!” ...Whatever lol I’m just glad that they all received letters because i was hoping it wasn’t just gonna be Naho while everyone else was in the dark. 

But yeah, I truly was intrigued by this anime’s description because dark shit is my kink and if a cute boy is suicidal that shit slap but I feel like the way they tried to show that in this anime was no bueno at least in my opinion (they could've done so much more, it's a shameeeee). Or who knows maybe I’m just cynical because I'm lonely and this whole review is a biased pile of dog shite. :-)

Now here’s me telling you the episodes that I thought had sad scenes in them were :p

Episode 3

Literally broooo in this episode there's a scene when the friend group are reading their letters in the future that they wrote to themselves from the past and when they finish they decide to read Kakeru’s letter since he’s not there to read it himself and when I tell you that shit HURTED. The fact that he literally writes to his friends his final thoughts of them instead of writing questions to himself because he knew back then that he had no future for himself, because he already had plans to end his life.... FUCK that HURTED.

“Did Kakeru know he’d have no future? Don’t tell me... he decided that for himself?”

Episode 7

In the classroom after school when Naho walks in and Kakeru says:

“I was just wondering if i jumped out this window… would I fly like superman?”

Naho is like :o because Kakeru is acting all suicidal. This scene is sad and cute though because i love Suwa and he walks in too after hearing Kakeru say this and he gives him a comforting bro hug when Kakeru tells him and Naho about how he thinks about killing himself everyday. It’s adorable :(((( <3 I love it when guy friends show emotions to their bros it’s very wholesome and we stan! But that also leads me to another topic. When comparing Kakeru’s situation to that of another suicidal person, unlike some people Kakeru actually has support. He has people who openly reach out to him and ask about how he’s doing and tell him that they love him. Some suicidal/depressed people have no one. Some people are alone all the time with their thoughts and no outlet to vent to. They don’t have any friends and they feel like no one will ever love them. They think they’d be a burden if they even spoke their problems aloud and even though Kakeru has this support system he still feels like he can’t share everything with them. Some suicidal people would be the same if they had this but others might be happier. (LOL idk why I write so much just ignore me at this point and save yourself by closing out of this review)

Episode 9 

This episode is sad in theory but for me it just made me cringe a lot ahhh >m< I get so uncomfortable over these types of things I even contemplated just dropping the anime at this episode but there’s only 13 episodes total so I’d might as well finish it hah. Basically in this episode they’re at their school sports relay event thingy and all their parents come to support them and in the old past none of Kakeru’s family/relatives came since his dad is out of the picture and his mom died and his friends hadn’t known about his grandma then so in this timeline they decide to invite Kakeru’s grandma. This is what’s cute in theory but in execution I just cringeeee lol maybe I’m not the right audience for this show... I'm too old too cynical. .. Even though this episode has some cringe moments, the scene where they’re all running the relay together and they end up changing the future by winning, was kinda cute <3

Episode 12

THIS EPISODE. Okay so the first half of this episode shows us what happened to Kakeru in the original past: his toxic father, getting bullied as a child, his tokyo friend’s laughing at him when he confesses he’s feeling suicidal, his suicide attempt, tripping during the relay and losing, and of course, killing himself.

Kakeru says this:

“If i had died then… what would a world without me be like? These guys were originally a group of five anyway, they’d just go back to that. Maybe I should've just stayed alone.”

And highkey i felt that shit... it’s too real. This episode really changed my whole perspective of this anime.. Even though it took a while to get here, I'm a bit glad I didn't end up dropping it. But fUCK maaannn the scene in this episode where Kakeru is reading the drafted email in his mother’s phone that she was going to send him before she died but ended up not,,, that shit was sad bro it was all kind of a misunderstanding :/ it’s kinda fucked up like kakeru was bullied in the club he’d joined at his old school so his mother decided they’d move so he could meet new people and she told him not to join a club so he wouldn’t get bullied again. Kakeru thought she was just being controlling so he didn’t join the soccer team :( He was harsh to his mother and didn’t realize his wrongs until she was already gone… that’s heavy bro..

Kakeru also says this:

“Would anyone be sad if I died?”

:(((( this anime makes more sense to me now .. it is relatable and originally I was planning on reviewing this poorly saying that the motivation made no sense and that the interactions were cringey... but Kakeru really was suffering… This episode is sad but I like it because it’s here that they finally SHOW us Kakeru’s inner demons which lead him to ultimately end it all rather than just ‘oh my mom died and I feel bad that I wasn't there’. We finally get more context for his behavior. I was worried at first that his only trigger for ending it all was because he broke a promise to his mom by not going to the hospital with her in favor of making friends, but now we see it was a lot of different things that led up to it as well. (Also I am a bit of a dark person so at first this whole plot line wasn’t substantial enough for me because I like seeing constant and prolonged pain and suffering that leads to a wholesome happy ending!!!!)

And finally, Episode 13

Everything comes together in the end, it’s sad and this episode show the day and the days leading up to Kakeru’s sucidie in the first timeline. On the fated night, the gang rushes out to the intersection where Kakeru died in the other timeline in order to stop Kakeru from ending his life. Kakeru ends up reading the drafted email from his mother like in the other timeline which is the catalyst for him to run outside. His bike is destroyed this time (lol Hagita) so he walks which makes him later to the intersection that before so his friends think he’s not coming at first. When Kakeru is about to walk in front of a moving truck, he ends up stopping himself. His friends see and rush over to him like ‘yo dude why’d you do that!!!’ and he’s like ‘:( I wanted to die but i also wanted to live another day to see what fun i’d have tomorrow with you guys<3’ they have a little group hug and it’s cute. They all end up showing Kakeru the letters they’d received from their future selves as well. The show ends with a happy ending and the gang buries a time capsule to open in 10 years~ I almost wish there was a credits scene that showed them 10 years from now with Kakeru to see how things turned out, but i guess that’s up to the viewers imagination.

Alrighty wow time for final thoughts. So the moral of this anime is, sometimes you can’t change the past but sometimes you can (LOL bad wording). Certain decisions just leads to different paths with different expected/unexpected outcomes that could be either good or bad. Sometimes you can change the bad to become good, but in turn, you could be erasing good memories in order to prevent the bad ones. Unexpected things occur no matter what you do, and the gang decides that if parallel universes exist, than they’re okay with using this universe to make Kakeru happy forever. Kinda cute, wholesome story. It wasn't groundbreakingly amazing or anything, but it was good. I probably wouldn’t recommend this show to everyone since there are dark themes and some scenes are a bit cringe (lol) but it was a pretty okay watch. So ye if you’re into this type of ‘saving our suicidal highschool friend!’ story then shoot go for it and watch this show lol. Alrighty, that's probably enough out of me. If you read this review, I apologize,,,,,,

that's all folks :-)

-doux



6/10 story
9/10 animation
9/10 sound
8/10 characters
6.5/10 overall
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nic016's avatar
Feb 16, 2019

This show is a really emotional one, and in the best way. Definite tear jerker, and is a beautiful story (including a beautiful ending). Every episode you get a bit more pulled in, and the build up doesn't disappoint. You need a good cry? Binge this show. Fantastic series! My only gripe with the show is the following:

(SPOILER DO NOT READ AHEAD)

The way letters get into the past is a real stretch, and I find it to be a sort of lazy way to make sense of it all. I would have been more satisfied if they made the "future" them more "future-y" and had some sort of technology to do so. But hey, I'm no writer so I don't know. Either way, I'm good with it.

7/10 story
7/10 animation
8/10 sound
9/10 characters
8/10 overall
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