Kimagure Orange Road

Kimagure Orange Road the Movie: I Want to Return to That Day • Kimagure Orange Road: Summer’s Beginning

kimagure orange road 1987. TV series. (48 X 30 min.) Comedy/fantasy. org Izumi Matsumoto (manga), Kenji Terada (concept). dir Osamu Kobayashi. scr Sukehiro Tomita. mus Shiro Sagisu. des Akemi Takada.

kimagure orange road the movie: i want to return to that day 1988. Movie. 70 min. Drama. dir Tomomi Mochizuki. scr Kenji Terada.

kimagure orange road: summer’s beginning 1996. Movie. 95 min. Science fiction/drama. dir Kunihiko Yuyama. scr Kenji Terada. -bc

Kimagure Orange Road is a wild ride of a high school romance, with a love triangle at its heart, hilarious situations abounding, and psychic powers and time travel thrown into the mix. It culminates in two very powerful movie dramas that resolve all of the emotional issues deftly sidestepped during the TV series.

Fifteen-year-old Kyosuke Kasuga has moved to a new town with his father and thirteen-year-old twin sisters, Kurumi and Manami, and the family cat, Jingoro. He and his sisters attend a local middle school, where he quickly meets two girls, Madoka, who is in his class, and Hikaru, who is in his sisters’ grade. A long-haired brunette, Madoka is the school’s “tough” girl, who sneaks a cigarette now and then and plays a mean sax when she gets the chance. Hikaru, Madoka’s best friend, is bubbly, excitable, and eternally perky. Kyosuke falls for Madoka and she for him, but they get no chance to reveal their feelings to each other before Hikaru latches onto Kyosuke and begins calling him “Darling” and treating him like a boyfriend. Unbeknownst to the girls, Kyosuke and his sisters have “powers,” psychic abilities such as moving objects with their minds, teleporting instantly to other places, and switching bodies with other people. Their father, who has no powers, has warned them not to use their abilities for fear of being discovered and having to move again.

Against this backdrop is a series of comic adventures involving the romantic triangle that de­velops and a group of supporting characters including Yuusaku, a judo expert who loves Hikaru and is jealous of Kyosuke; Kazuya, Kyosuke’s mischievous little cousin, who also has powers; Kyosuke’s maternal grandfather, who also has powers; and Kyosuke’s classmate pals, Komatsu and Hatta, who devote their spare time to taking photos of all the girls, including Kyosuke’s sisters, in the most compromising positions they can manage. The psychic powers often create awkward situations as when little Kazuya switches bodies with Kyosuke so that he won’t have to go to the dentist and behaves in such a way, while in Kyosuke’s body, that everyone gets mad at him. At the end of the TV series, the romantic triangle remains curiously unresolved.

The first movie, I Want to Return to That Day, takes place during summer vacation after Kyosuke’s and Madoka’s senior year of high school. He and Madoka go to summer school to cram for their upcoming college exams, while Hikaru auditions and rehearses a role in a school musical (“Downtown Cats”). As Kyosuke bonds with Madoka at summer school and finally reveals his true feelings to her, Madoka insists that he make a final choice between her and Hikaru. He sits Hikaru down and explains the situation in a direct, matter-of-fact way and then declares that they shouldn’t see each other anymore. The poor, stunned girl cannot believe this has happened and over the subsequent weeks behaves as if it simply hasn’t. She continues to call Kyosuke and seek him out, even showing unannounced on his doorstep late at night, sometimes in the rain. Her misplaced confidence tells her that such tactics will ensure his return to her. Eventually, her role in the musical proves just the distraction she needs to get over the breakup.

The second movie, Summer’s Beginning, takes place a few years later and opens in 1994 when Kyosuke, a student photographer visiting war-torn Bosnia, is caught in an explosion. The film then cuts back to the summer of 1991 as Kyosuke runs across a busy street to make a class and is hit by a car. As he lies near death in the hospital and his friends and family gather, he is propelled into the future, the summer of 1994, where he looks for recognizable signs of his life. The big story on the news is the disappearance of a Japanese student in Bosnia—Kyosuke! He runs into Hikaru, who is now a performer in musical theatre based in New York. Meanwhile, the 1994 Madoka is alerted by Kyosuke’s grandfather to the presence of the 1991 Kyosuke in Tokyo, so she begins looking for him. Hikaru and Kyosuke get together that night at a hotel restaurant and wind up sleeping over in the same room, but not in the same bed. Madoka finds them there in the morning and, after some initial awkwardness, the three go off and have a mini-reunion. Eventually, the real 1994 Kyosuke is found and treated and sent back to Japan, where the 1991 Kyosuke is having trouble getting back to his own time. . . .

Kimagure Orange Road (1989–91, OAV, 8 eps.)

The eight OAV episodes were released after the TV series and first movie, but took place well before the events of the movie.

The TV series is a 1980s high school comedy with fantasy touches done in the wake of the similarly-styled Urusei Yatsura (but before Ranma 1⁄2), adding a number of cartoonish elements that lend themselves more to the comical aspects of the story than to the dramatic ones. The characters all have wide faces with huge eyes and massive dollops of hair plopped onto their heads. Their bodies are built for frenetic slapstick action and constant falling and running (and fighting).

The setting is a fictional ward outside metropolitan Tokyo, and while the backgrounds are simply designed and executed with lots of light and bright colors, they do evoke the sense of a suburban town and the places that become important to the characters, from the long stone staircase where Kyosuke and Madoka first meet and the park where the characters go on outings, to the coffee shop where the main characters frequently congregate and the sprawling hilltop apartment with the beautiful view where the Kasugas reside. Some interesting scenes are created from this mix, including a very cool bit where Kyosuke, killing time before a date with Hikaru, comes upon a lone Madoka practicing a saxophone solo in a secluded grove by the lake.

The first movie follows the design scheme of the series, although the emphasis on drama means the elimination of the comic and fantastic aspects of the story and a greater role for everyday settings to serve as backdrops to the characters’ emotional states, as in the scene where the still unbelieving Hikaru waits on Kyosuke’s street anxiously at night for him to show up.

The movie also adopts a different mode of storytelling. There are long takes where the camera doesn’t move and the characters sit in silence or in difficult conversation. There are quiet, intimate moments and instances of genuine tenderness shared by Kyosuke and Madoka. There is one long take of Kyosuke on the phone at night with Madoka on the other end. The animators understand that they don’t have to keep things moving all the time. Silence and stillness can be the most effective dramatic strategies.

The second movie takes the design scheme to an entirely new level. Made eight years after the first movie, and set, alternately, three and six years later, it reimagines all the regular characters in dead-serious realistic mode. The three main characters don’t look at all like they used to. Not only are they older, but they’re taller, sleeker, and more lifelike, with more sensible hairstyles. Hikaru isn’t the squeaky-voiced high-spirited ditz she seemed to be in the TV show. She’s a young, independent adult, a New Yorker now and a very attractive one, someone who’d be more at home on Sex and the City than in an animated movie. The characters are now in the pulsating modern metropolis of Tokyo’s sharply detailed streamlined urban settings.

Kimagure Orange Road seems an unlikely candidate for the label of anime saga, but it really does tell a long human drama, the story of a romance from its initial spark at the top of a staircase in the very first episode to its culmination in the characters’ first night of love at the very end of the last movie after some forty-eight TV episodes, eight OAV episodes, and two movies later. The whole thing doesn’t have to be seen in its entirety or in the proper order to be enjoyed, but it’s a richer experience in the long run to watch everything in order before sitting down to the final movie. Despite the comical elements and fantasy touches in the TV series and four of the OAV episodes, the dramatic brilliance of the movies stands out as one of the great achievements in animated drama.

The TV series is frequently funny and often quite clever in its use of fantastic elements to create comic situations. The ongoing thread of the unresolved love triangle keeps the series dramatically interesting and contributes some very serious moments in the midst of everything else, such as the episode where the kids form a rock band to enter a contest and Hikaru is enraged at Kyosuke after hearing he’d spent most of the night at the apartment of an older woman connected to the band. There are also science fiction aspects in the well-handled treatment of time travel, particularly in the last two episodes of the TV series, where Kyosuke goes back in time to encounter a ten-year-old Madoka and an eight-year-old Hikaru.

One of the curious aspects of the series is the sex-obsessed behavior of most of the males in it. Madoka and Hikaru are constantly fighting off the rough advances of rapacious older guys, with Ma­doka, in particular, relying on martial arts and her skill at using a guitar pick as a weapon. Kyosuke’s creepy friends, Hatta and Komatsu, are forever trying to take pictures of girls with their skirts up and even bribe young Kazuya to pull up the skirts of his cousins, Kurumi and Manami, both of whom are only thirteen. Old men constantly leer at young girls, and Kyosuke’s grandfather is particularly lecherous, going so far as to utter the alarming line to Madoka, “It’s always a pleasure to hear young girls scream.” Even Kyosuke’s photographer dad gets into the act when he picks thirteen-year-old Hikaru to be his bikini model. There is also a street sign warning, “Beware of perverts lurking at night.” More often than not, this is all treated comically.

Fortunately, the movies dispense with the nonsensical (and disturbing) aspects of the series and focus entirely on the central love triangle, its resolution, and aftermath. The first movie is as brutally honest a treatment of teen romance as ever produced—in either live-action or animation—and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a breakup like that experienced by Hikaru here will recognize all the different stages and sheer range of emotions on display. One can’t help but feel extraordinary sympathy for both Hikaru and Kyosuke and wonder if there was any way to resolve this without so much pain for all concerned. The second movie, made eight years later, picks up on the tensions of the first in a series of scenes bringing together all three main characters for the first time since the previous movie. They’re older, more accomplished, but still a little fazed by what happened back then, and not entirely healed. Yet, when Madoka walks into the hotel room and finds her boyfriend, Kyosuke, alone with Hikaru, who protests, “It’s not what you think,” Madoka’s first response to Hikaru is to warmly hug her, an expression of the old friendship which has never left her. Later, as they hang out by the pool in a mini-reunion, the women stand and talk, while Kyosuke plays in the water. As Hikaru explains what happened the night before, she asserts, “I’m not apologizing. I won’t apologize to you, Madoka.” This is a powerful line and the first clear indication of the effects of the breakup eight years earlier on her feelings toward Madoka, and of how far Hikaru has come since the previous entries in the series. The dialogue and the behavior are mature, in the best sense of the word.

The time-travel aspects of the second movie represent an intriguing variation on a longtime sci-fi staple. Here Kyosuke gets to see what his life and his friends will be like in three years. A particularly clever aspect of all this is the fact that Kyosuke is still a virgin when he’s hit by the car and propelled into the future to a time when he will no longer be a virgin. When the 1991 Kyosuke sleeps for the night in the 1994 Madoka’s house, he expects to sleep with Madoka, who pointedly steers him to the couch and says, “Good night, Mr. Virgin,” not wanting to ruin the moment back in 1991 when they first sleep together. Of course, sci-fi/time travel purists might object to the later encounter at the airport between the two Kyosukes. Someone’s rules of time travel are surely being broken there.

Madoka is an accomplished musician in the series and we get to see her perform a number of times, including her saxophone solos in the TV series, her singing in the OAV episode, “Stage of Love = Heart on Fire!,” and, in the second movie, a piano solo of a piece she composed, “Kyosuke No. 1.”

Hikaru finds her true calling in the first movie when she wins the lead role in the musical, “Downtown Cats,” and we get to see her dance onstage. In the second movie, we see her perform an elaborate and impressive routine at a Tokyo audition. There’s a credit at the end for the actual choreographer, Yumi Endoh.

Izumi Matsumoto wrote and drew the original manga, which was serialized in Shonen Jump magazine from 1984 to 1987. Tomomi Mochizuki (Maison Ikkoku, Ocean Waves) directed the first movie and some episodes of the series. Akemi Takada did the character design for the series, the first movie, and the OAVs. She also did character designs for Urusei Ya­tsura, Maison Ikkoku, and Patlabor.

In the first movie, Kyosuke and Madoka go to see a movie and the film they’re watching is an actual animated movie called Touch: Sebango no Nai Ace (Touch, Ace Without a Number on His Back), a 1986 movie spun off from Touch, a popular animated TV drama about a love triangle involving a pair of twin baseball-playing brothers and the girl next door.

The music soundtracks of the TV and OAV series include a couple of love songs performed by Kanako Wada, an actual Japanese pop star who is referenced in the first movie when tickets to one of her concerts become a plot point.

The director of the second movie, Kunihiko Yuyama, had earlier directed GoShogun: The Time Étranger (1985), which has an intriguing thematic similarity to Summer’s Beginning. Just as the later film was a sequel to an earlier TV series, GoShogun was a sequel to a giant robot TV series, Sengoku Majin GoShogun, from four years earlier, and features a character in a coma at a hospital, wounded while on her way to a decades-later reunion and attended at the hospital by her former teammates (who piloted with her a combat robot called GoShogun). She then goes off on a dream journey to alternate worlds and flashbacks to her youth.

profanity Some profanity in the subtitles. nudity Semi-nudity in some scenes. advisory Lots of not-so-borderline perversion on the part of Kyosuke’s friends and the panty shots they take of any and all girls in their sphere—including Kyosuke’s thirteen-year-old twin sisters. The old men in the film display frequent lecherous behavior. The teen characters drink alcohol and some smoke cigarettes.