Colorful

Colorful (カラフル, 2010), directed by Keiichi Hara, is a Japanese animated drama you can watch online on iFILM. A soul arriving at the afterlife's transit station is told it has been given a rare reprieve: it must inhabit the body of Kobayashi Makoto, a fourteen-year-old boy who has just taken his own life, and figure out what went so badly wrong.

The soul has two assignments — uncover the great sin of its own past life, and understand what drove Makoto to that point. With a spirit guide named Purapura watching from the sidelines, it slowly discovers the layers the boy kept hidden: a mother carrying a secret, a classmate no one looked at closely enough, a friendship that was never what it appeared. The film is based on Eto Mori's award-winning novel and produced by Sunrise studio.

Colorful is one of those animated films that trusts its audience to sit with something uncomfortable. It doesn't wrap teenage despair in a tidy lesson — it treats the mess of adolescent life seriously, with the patience to let small moments accumulate into something real. Stream Colorful (2010) online on iFILM.