Everything ends eventually. I wasn't the biggest fan of Kimagure Orange Road, the series was nothing more than anime comfort food. Something to throw on late at night whenever I was too tired to focus on much else. The pastel colors, loveable characters, and occasional great episodes and moments kept me coming back to it despite the issues with its often soap opera-esque writing and questionable characterization. The thing that separates the film from the series that precedes it is the reality of the situation. It takes everything about the series, its silliness, and warmth, and just leaves behind its characters. It forces them to confront thedeeply amoral and borderline abusive nature of their behavior. If Orange Road was a sitcom designed to go on forever, I Want to Return to That Day is what happens when a sitcom must end. Life does not have easy comforting solutions, and even its most intense moments are rarely cathartic. There are no dramatic music swells while characters scream at each other, there is only raw silence. The film almost borders on genuine slow cinema thanks to its crushing pace. Everything is minimal, there are few jump cuts, instead, the proverbial camera tends to linger, letting the audience take in the small things. There are no distractions. The show is over, life goes on.

Kyosuke Kasuga may come from a family with supernatural powers, he may be a time traveler with whacky, scheming friends and a crush on a girl who wields guitar picks as weapons and dramatically plays the saxophone in the rain whenever she's sad. But at the end of the day, none of that was the point of Orange Road, it wasn't about the powers or the fights or the intrigue, it was about the people, about the moments with high school friends you don't talk to anymore.

Everything ends eventually, it almost always hurts. But that's okay.

Life goes on.