ReLIFE, a second shot at high school done right
A 27-year-old takes a pill that makes him look like a teenager again and relives a year of high school. Not quite time travel, but close enough for me, and the ending sticks the landing.
Spoilers ahead, including the ending.
I love anything time-travel adjacent, and ReLIFE scratches that itch without actually being time travel. Arata, 27 and a bit stuck in life, takes a pill that physically de-ages him so he can pass for a teenager, and he reenrolls to relive a year of high school. He doesn’t go back in time. He goes back into the experience, carrying his adult mind into it, and that difference is the whole point.
I’d never say I want to go back to high school. But if someone handed me a once-in-a- lifetime pill that knocked a few years off and let me run it again, knowing I’d eventually land right back where I am now? Yeah, I’d probably give it a go.
What makes it land
The twist I love is that Chizuru Hishiro, the smart, socially awkward girl in his class, turns out to be a subject in the program too, on her second term, getting another chance to get it right. They both end up falling for each other, and they have the same shape of story without knowing it.
The reward for finishing the program is help getting a job afterward, and the guy who started out unsure about the whole thing decides he wants to work at the facility that runs it. He becomes a mentor in the program himself. That’s the perfect full circle.
The ending is what really got me. When the year is up, everyone they knew has their memories of them erased, so the two of them go to sleep that last night believing they’ll never see each other again. But they both quietly leave themselves a way to remember, a way to find each other, and they do, outside the program, outside that borrowed year. They find each other in their real lives. It’s wonderful.
The whole series is beautiful to look at, and I love how every minor character has a place and a reason for being there. The mindset shift, an adult living a kid’s year on purpose, changes everything for him and for everyone around him. It’s a genuinely wholesome show, and it doesn’t hand you everything up front. You get to figure out where it’s all going to land on your own.