The awkwardly-titled and specifically-styled Orange is a show about a 16-year-old girl, Naho Takamiya, who receives a letter from her 26-year-old future self, detailing moments that the older her regrets, with instructions for how to make different choices and hopefully avoid living haunted by what she did or didn’t do in those days. As pitches go, it’s a very compelling one.
Which is, in a sense, interesting in its own regard. When dealing with Western media, I’ve never really been a huge fan of time travel plots. There are exceptions, but it’s a device that at least for me fails in Western productions about as often as it works, and often in the more dramatic manner. When it comes to Anime, though, I’ve come to really look forward to Time Travel stories. Not that there aren’t still duds (I’ve looked at RErideD which was no winner) but some extremely impactful stories involve or are centered around the concept, and it’s generally at least an intriguing element.
Maybe this has something to do with the dominant mode of time travel. When I think of Western time travel stories, it’s usually about visiting the past as an interloper, often meaning visiting significant historical events rather than just events that are important to the precise character. Essentially, “time travel” often serves as more of a funky isekai sort of scenario. When I think about Time Travel in anime, it’s less about taking the Wayback Machine to go somewhere and more turning back the clock or going for a New Game Plus sort of scenario – a time loop or time leap that sends information into the past more than it sends an extra body. In short, I think of scenarios less like killing Hitler or bringing modern technology to King Arthur’s court, and more like Orange here.
For whatever reason, these stories seem to dodge the usual unfortunate snarls and produce more compelling stories on average. Add in different media conventions, where you’re kind of willing to accept a little more weirdness in your average anime than in your average film, and it seems to be a recipe for greater success than the alternative formula. I could wax long and extemporaneous on why that might be the case, but I’m just going to assume you’re here for a review of Orange and not a panel on Time Travel in Anime, and thus will get on with the show.
Orange begins with a glimpse of the Older Naho, seemingly unearthing a time capsule with her friends as her narration recounts that her life is full of regrets. We then cut to Naho at sixteen, running late for her first day of being a second-year student, discovering the mysterious letter from herself.
The letter, which she starts to read once she arrives at class, seems unbelievable, but even the starting facts of the day are things that no one should have been able to guess, particularly culminating with the arrival of a mysterious transfer student, Kakeru Naruse, who the letter calls out by name. Naho and her friends end up hanging out with Kakeru after school (which the letter mentioned wanting to avoid that day and that day only), in which time he seems to be a quite nice fellow. Following the afternoon, though, he’s absent for two weeks, reappearing in time for a school sports festival.
The letter, which Naho is now taking quite seriously, mentions a few things about that day. One is that she’ll be asked to act as a pinch hitter in her class’s softball game, and that on Naho the Elder’s timeline she refuses and carries that regret. The other is that it’s the day she’s set to fall for Kakeru.
Sure enough, things seem to happen according to the letter: Naho’s feet hurt pretty bad due to overly tight PE shoes (which she doesn’t want to exchange because she’s too worried about being a bother to others) so she doesn’t want to be the pinch hitter. However, recalling the letter and seeing the scenario play out, she reckons why her older self still regretted that choice and at the last minute steps up to do it. She hits a home run, proving that the timeline can be changed, and towards the end of the day has an encounter and good talk with Kakeru, who noticed her predicament earlier and arrives with a first aid kit to take care of her blisters. That prophecy is, thus, fulfilled.
The letter goes on, however, to warn that Kakeru is gone by the ten-year future, and tells Naho to keep a close watch over him. Thus ends the first episode.
As I often do, I’ll take a pause here at the end of episode one to address some endemic traits of the show. The one I really want to call out is the art style. The art style for Orange is subtly different from what you would normally see. You might not notice at first exactly what’s “off” but you’ll probably tell pretty quickly when you watch it that something is, if not “wrong” than at least idiosyncratic and unfamiliar, similar to how you might feel watching a show from a different period of Anime or from a creator with a unique visual style for the first time.
In the case of Orange, it’s that the character designs are… just a little more realistically detailed than you’d normally see out of anime characters in a show that looks more or less like the “normal world” of most any Post-Haruhi school show. A lot of the stills would seem to fit right in with the less inspired shots from Hyouka or just about anything from In Search of the Lost Future (Another time travel show, and one of the ones that didn’t quite works as well). However, in other shots, you’d get a clearer picture of what’s different. Characters in Orange often have lines for upper lips and detail in their dental that would normally be left out in animation. Combined with facial proportions that, while still mostly like other modern Anime do lean more normal, it’s something that can take a little getting used to.
In any case, from here Naho tries her best to use the letter of regrets in order to change the future. The biggest obstacle between herself and her success? Her own timid nature, as it’s very difficult to change what a person is like just through even a very convincing letter. As such, she struggles through some of her future self’s requests and stumbles at others.
One interesting element of this show is that we do see quite a few scenes from the “Ten years in the future” crowd as they get back together to remember. I mention this, because there’s an odd juxtaposition: in the future, Naho is married to one of her other friends, Suwa, and even has an infant child. While she may have many regrets, her family doesn’t seem to be one of them. At the same time, the instructions in the letter are heavily about building Naho’s relationship with Kakeru – probably in the service of averting Kakeru’s tragic death, but it does come off a little different when one recalls that the younger Naho is head over heels for him and Suwa seems to support her going for Kakeru in a case of wanting his beloved to be happy.
This is fairly highlighted with there being a major arc where Naho takes too roundabout a means and doesn’t manage to tell Kakeru not to date a beautiful yet bitchy upperclasswoman until after he’s already agreed, leading to her avoiding him for sometime because she’s always around. After Kakeru and his girlfriend have a fight, though, it’s clear to the audience that he’s much more interested in Naho, and he even intends to break things off with his Senpai.
Since Orange is more about being a slow burn romance than a time-travel drama, upgrading any sort of relationship between Naho and Kakeru still takes time, and Suwa is also part of the equation. Willing to give up his stakes though he may be, Suwa still looks out for Naho, protecting her from being bullied by Kakeru’s ex and helping set her up in the romance she wants. The letter does at least give him some thought, as he’s called out as someone who helped her put herself back together, suggesting that they became an item in the prime timeline after tragedy struck.
Speaking of the prime timeline, the show doesn’t entirely neglect to spell out its theory of time travel, with a science teacher using some spare lecture time to present an idea in which information could be sent to the past, but that the system would work via parallel worlds, such that the traveler or sender’s reality is unchanged. I guess this is a way not just to establish a theory of time travel (which is important in a time travel show) but also to ensure that Past Naho changing what Future Naho regrets doesn’t destroy anything Future Naho may have held dear, like her relationship with Suwa.
As Naho tries to get closer, she’s partially successful, but she learns as we did that Kakeru’s “accident” was actually suicide, and that the reason is that he feels guilt over his mother’s suicide, having failed to act as the keeper of her failing physical and mental health on the first day, which is when she did the deed. As she despairs at her failure to save Kakeru on her own she thinks to bring Suwa into the loop, only to find out that he at the very least also has a letter detailing the quest to save Kakeru.
From a viewer standpoint, any lingering weirdness over Naho trying to matchmake her past self with not her future husband is kind of dispelled. This is a mission by a group of friends to protect one of their number who they felt responsible for not saving from his grief.
From there, it turns out that while Naho may be the key… Suwa is kind of better at this? He manufactures all the opportunities Naho should need and then some, which even gets Kakeru to confess his feelings to Naho (something he evidently never did in prime timeline), and when Naho can’t answer because she’s too worried about being a bother (despite her future self practically spelling out “GO FOR IT!”), Suwa manages to keep creating openings for her to respond and ultimately is the one to successfully open the painful talk with Kakeru about his regrets and thoughts of suicide and what it means to be friends when Naho can’t. She does finally use that opportunity to say how she really feels, at least, telling Kakeru that he needs to not die because it would break her heart.
This brings us over the midpoint of the show. Kakeru and Naho have said how they feel, and the mission is on, for the present as much as the past, to see an earnest smile without sadness out of Kakeru yet.
Naho is pretty bad at this, so it’s fortunate that it comes out that all her friends do, in fact, have letters of their own and the same goal, because this girl misses that an outstretched hand from her “it’s complicated” is an invitation to hold hands.
Speaking of “It’s Complicated”, I imagine some viewers would be getting kind of frustrated with Naho and Kakeru at this point: even episodes after admitting the love is mutual, they still aren’t upgraded to “going out”. Yet, I personally find this failure to launch to be kind of realistic. Naho is clearly nervous, and inoffensive to a fault, so Kakeru pretty much was always going to have the first move. On Kakeru’s side, he talks (to Suwa, because Suwa is a bro) about how he’s worried he “might vanish” and hurt Naho if they were dating. He couches it in the idea that he might end up moving again, but it’s clearly a veiled reference to suicide even though, by this point, one attempt mentioned in the letter has been averted.
The thing is, there’s a difference between being depressed and having depression. Someone can be depressed if something’s getting them down. Having depression is having a remorseless, tireless foe in your own head tearing you down. Kakeru’s situation may be rooted, technically, in the death of his mother and how he (not without some cause) blames himself for what happened, but it’s clear from how he’s portrayed that he has Depression in a big way, rather than just being garden-variety sad and guilty about events.
And frankly that excuses the long and herculean effort it’s taking to save him from himself. True, his course might have been modified out of outright suicide more easily than the kids know, but actually rooting out his issues and bringing him to a place where he can operate as a normal person with full stability? That’s hard for professionals with long-term access. The kids have the advantage that they’re with Kakeru basically all the time, but it’s still a big ask in any timeline.
Things start to look up with an arc around the school athletic meet. In Prime Timeline, Kakeru got injured early, hid it, and fell as the anchor for the relay race, destroying what positive mood he might have had and leaving him with some heavy regret. In this timeline, they manipulate things to run the relay with him, and while they don’t manage to stop him from getting his ankle hurt they do manage to notice it and have some first aid applied, so that when the final leg of the race comes, he passes everyone up and takes first place rather than last for the team. The inspirational message passed along with the baton may also have helped.
Suwa also takes a slightly different stance with Kakeru, needling him over his “it’s complicated” with Naho and actually managing to make him a little jealous – a negative reaction for a moment, but as Suwa himself intuits a good sign that Kakeru is actually caring about and wanting something.
Once that event is done, this blooms into a more full study of Suwa’s place in the time-changing dynamics. At least some of the letters (other than Naho’s apparently) mention her future relationship with Suwa, and the moments other than Kakeru’s death that may have enabled it. The other friends call Suwa to task on going off script, potentially throwing away his happy family future that they (and their future selves) are sure wouldn’t need to be exclusive with getting Kakeru to not commit suicide.
Suwa, however, is resolute. Despite everything, he tries to avert the moment where, after Kakeru and Naho had a fight at New Year’s Eve, he confessed his feelings to her. The fight, unfortunately, comes about anyway, and Suwa does appear at the right time and place, but this Suwa instead gives Naho the push she needs to chase after Kakeru.
Because apparently checking out his house never occurs to this girl, she doesn’t make it that night, and struggles trying to mend the rift once school is back in session, especially because Kakeru seems to be avoiding her. On the fateful Valentines’ Day, the day before Kakeru’s death is scheduled, Naho finally manages to work up the resolve to tell him in an earnest and unvarnished way how she feels, even standing up to bully-senpai for a moment on her way to deliver chocolates and important words.
Of course, we also get an extended sequence of Kakeru’s life and death on the Prime Timeline, so we know that his suicide wasn’t predicated entirely on his relationship with Naho or his other friends, but instead on discovering a message from his mom. The kids are reasonably worried about the critical moment as well, and stake out the corner where it’s supposed to happen, only for Kakeru’s movements to be different.
The group fails to intercept Kakeru, but Kakeru also fails to go through with it, getting out of the way at the last moment and denying Truck-san its prey. The group crowds around him, find’s he’s okay, hears him out, and then open up about their letters and, with the divergence point passed, that those stuffed little envelopes contained letters for Kakeru as well.
Hearing the regrets of his friends ten years later breaks through to Kakeru, and it seems in a short epilogue that things are going to be okay with him after that. I guess having five people watching out for you and time-bending messages in bottles will do a number on poor self-esteem. Suwa is again oddly the forefront of the effort of actually saying what needs to be said to Kakeru, telling him that if he dies, they’ll never forgive him, which is exactly the sort of thing Kakeru needed to hear.
With Kakeru saved, Orange knows it’s said its piece and shuffles off with some degree of grace.
For me, for the most part, this is the show that really kills both AnoHana and In Search of the Lost Future. Now, I will remind folks that in my estimation those aren’t exactly high bars to clear, but it’s still impressive to kill two birds with one stone like that.
That said, there are ways in which the comparison, especially with the latter, is more relevant and interesting than “Orange better”, so I figure I should address that. I’ll try to not recap too much of my earlier reviews.
So, what’s the compare and contrast with AnoHana? Well, they’re both shows about a group of teens in a world that’s presented as being essentially the real world, plus one magical break from fact that lets the plot happen. In both cases, we also have a group of friends who have to deal with their grief over the death of another friend in the past, and who work together for the sake of said friend.
To shortcut basically my whole review of that show, it really stumbled in how the friend, Menma, was used. In Orange, Kakeru is central to the plot since the whole quest our five friends have is to save him… but he’s not central to the universe. Prime Timeline shows us that while sadder for it the others would go on without him and even make their own futures. It feels a lot more balanced and the characters feel more like real people, which helps the story in a massive way. There are some good scenes in AnoHana, but it’s easier to connect with the less overwrought bits in Orange because of how much more real Naho, Suwa, and the others are compared to the cast of that other show.
On the other hand, the reconciliation dynamic of AnoHana does have its play. There, the characters are legitimately estranged and it’s a question if they will or even should reunite. It’s a different kind of drama than trying to drag Kakeru out of his depression and it’s going to play better with some people, who would rather have a little more motion and melodrama and a little less of “girl can’t speak her mind”.
In Search of the Lost Future is the more similar show. After all, they are both shows about a future version of (one of) the characters sending something back in time to save a different character from a terrible fate, mostly via shipping. It’s a kind of specific formula to be used twice. Naturally, I rather favor Orange’s version. I think the fact that we spend the entire show on one Revised Timeline with cuts to the Prime Timeline that spawned it really goes over better than the awkward pacing of three runs in In Search of the Lost Future. Further, by bringing it back to the letters all the time, Orange keeps the pressure higher. In the other show, there’s not a strong sense that everything is building up to the accident or that everything we’re seeing matters. In Orange, we’re changing smaller events along the way, trying to win a bright future bit by bit, which is dramatically more engaging.
However, the one aspect of In Search of the Lost Future I called out when I reviewed that show is one in which I still have to give it the edge in a weird way: the future. Now, I said back then that I’d be open to a time travel story like it that actually goes and shows us more of the future characters who initiate the temporal revision, which Orange kind of fits; we get plenty of scenes with the Prime Timeline, even if they all are localized to a single day in which the crew gets together to dig up their time capsule, pay their respects, and so on. This opposed to bits of just a couple episodes in the other show.
But… it’s just that. Honestly, the place where Orange most stumbles is its time travel. Establishing that it’s parallel world time travel and Prime Timeline will never see the results, okay, that was needed. But unfortunately, especially in the last couple of episodes, they go farther. Physics Teacher’s lecture in high school suggested that time travel could be initiated by a black hole. Okay, technically black holes were used as the Handwavium in Steins;Gate, so it’s something like that? They somehow hack together the analog version of the Phone Microwave? Nope! We just speculate that there are lurking black holes somewhere in the ocean, like the Bermuda Triangle, so if we send letters addressed to our past selves into the ocean, they will somehow be delivered to the exact right time and place in another timeline.
Even one of the characters, enjoyable grump Hagita, calls out how this is bullcrud, but the show just kind of goes with it. We spend a reasonable amount of time debating the particulars of this method of temporal messaging and such. I’m just going to assume that Haruhi herself was a little bit offscreen, overheard them talking, and thought it would be cool if it worked, because that honestly makes more sense than taking the time traveling letters in Orange at face value. This is one of the rare cases where an element is simultaneously overexplained and underexplained, or perhaps overexplained yet undersold; if we never got an answer as to how or why the letters made it to the past we could blame magic or what have you, like their feelings were strong enough to stretch. It wouldn’t have been great, but it would have been fine.
If it had been sold better, it would have been more like In Search of the Lost Future. In that show, the main character goes on to become a mad scientist, who works for years to create his homunculus waifu and send her back to change the future for Waifu #1. Seeing the obsession of a protagonistic mad scientist and the trappings of technical details (even if the technicals don’t fundamentally make sense) was great, and sold the time travel. Here in Orange, they what? Chuck some letters into convenient water and hope the urban legend black holes in uncharted seas will take good care of them? Black holes are not physics fairy magic! They’re kind of unknown in some regards so you can excuse a lot with an event horizon, but it takes at least some actual token effort to do it!
That addressed, I do feel the need to stress: the core of Orange is stronger by far than the core of In Search of the Lost Future. I would just be remiss if I did not take at least a few shots at Orange’s baffling address of its time travel element.
So, how does Orange sift out?
Orange is effective. It has good characters who make strong connections and a very solid plot that feels like it has the meaning and weight that it wants to.
On the other hand, Orange is slow, and Naho isn’t necessarily the greatest protagonist. This thing is thirteen episodes, and very little “happens”. I’d argue that most of the time is fairly well used to establish and maintain the mood, but it’s not one that action show fans are going to shift gears into comfortably. For Naho’s part… when I say she’s conflict-averse to a fault, I mean it. There’s a lot of weight given to her particular romantic bond with Kakeru, and her attempts to progress that bond are less than halfhearted. She lets herself be easily held back or discouraged and constantly needs support and pushes to do less than what you would think the bare minimum would be.
Because the show is from Naho’s point of view for the most part, this tends to be excused or justified. But if this kind of limp noodle act would annoy you normally, it’s going to really annoy you here, no two ways about it.
Those problems, however, don’t eclipse the core strengths. I rate Orange at a solid B, and would recommend it to anyone in the mood for a slower-paced romance with some serious emotional drama