Colorful

Saw Colorful, a cute film about a spirit who is injected into the body of a recently suicided school boy. The spirit has no knowledge of this kid's previous life and personality, what drove him to suicide, but must live a "good life" to be reconsidered for the karmic wheel. So most of the film is taken up with the spirit discovering this kid's past and dealing with the many problems this kid was facing.

The film is prettily drawn and naturalistic. The spiritual stuff is mostly handled in the intro and by a supernatural little boy character who is basically a narrator that only the protagonist can see. The boy's problems mostly revolve around his love life and his relationship to his mother. This leads to some super-uncomfortable scenes where the increasingly visibly suffering mother tries to apologise for whatever drove him to suicide by making him elaborate western-style dinners. The spirit in the boy's body, despite not knowing this woman, hates her and bullies her mercilessly. As the plot unfolds, we find she's not exactly blameless but those scenes sure are painful to watch. I think she's meant to be so cringing and pathetic that we don't feel bad for her, but this only heightens the pathos for me.

Anyway, apart from all of that, the film is a sort of optimistic, sweet, coming-of-age film about second chances and living fully. The colors of the title refers to a kind of tortured metaphor about people being made up of many pigments. Because the protagonist is inheriting the suicidal boy's life, it doesn't really care about that life, but as it grows (and, as a child grows) it becomes aware that its actions have consequences which make it feel shitty.

The film is a sweet melodrama. Things are kind of overwrought, but we start out with some sort of situation that would drive a kid to suicide, so the stakes are already high. A sweet little movie.