The Colors Within Movie Review: Scotland Loves Anime 2024
At only forty years of age, director Naoko Yamada’s career comprises an impressive number of excellent movies and TV shows. Her directing work at top tier animation studio Kyoto Animation brought us K-On!, Tamako Market, Tamako Love Story, Liz and the Blue Bird, and perhaps most famously, A Silent Voice. Since 2021 she’s worked with studio Science Saru, directing The Heike Story, The Garden of Remembrance, and now her latest, and highly anticipated return to the big screen with The Colors Within.
Along with the adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Look Back, The Colors Within was undoubtedly one of the most anticipated movies at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime film festival in Glasgow, with a packed (and very hot!) cinema crowded out with excited Yamada fans. Yamada herself, along with long-time collaborator and composer Kensuke Ushio, attended the screening for an excellent live Q&A afterwards.
The Colors Within explores the concept of synesthesia — the unusual sensory ability intrinsic to some people who can perceive sensory information via other modalities — for example there are people who can “see” sounds, or “hear” colours. Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky explored the concept in his work, and videogame director Tetsuya Mizuguchi referenced Kandinsky in his incredible Sega Dreamcast game Rez (one of my top videogames of all time), with which Mizuguchi intended to approximate the phenomenon of synesthesia in its players. The Colors Within’s delightful protagonist Totsuko Higurasgi is a synesthete — she perceives other human beings not by their normal visual appearances, but by their colours/auras. She’s particularly drawn to those whose colours are bright, clean and vibrant — though sadly she’s unable to see her own colour.
Totsuko lives in a town based on Yamada’s location scouting work in Nagasaki Prefecture, though it isn’t outright identified as such in the story. She attends an all-girls Roman Catholic high school run by nuns with very strict rules. A pious lass, she’s often portrayed praying alone in the chapel, in fact we’re first introduced to her as she prays the first clause from the famous serenity prayer attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
One of the nuns overhears her and reminds her of the rest of the prayer:
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
The nun recognises that Totsuko feels she lacks the courage or wisdom to change anything about her life. Totsuko’s always been different to other children, often with her head in the clouds, she experiences the world in a different way and struggles to express herself. While other children paint pictures with recognisable human figures in them, Totsuko’s pictures are of colourful blobs, only vaguely human-shaped. Previously she learned ballet at her mother’s ballet school, but lacked skill or coordination and dropped out. She’s desperate for some kind of meaningful human connection, and when she glimpses the radiant blue aura of older fellow student Kimi Sakunaga, she’s instantly transfixed. When the seemingly perfect Kimi unexpectedly drops out of school, Totsuko obsessively searches for her, though with no particular plan of what to do when she finds her.
We never learn Kimi’s reasoning for leaving full time education, as she instead finds a job minding a backstreet bookstore. She lives with her attentive grandmother who thinks Kimi is still attending school — she still leaves the house wearing her uniform, after all — but Kimi hates the idea of disappointing her, so keeps her choice secret. Kimi spends her time learning to play guitar, and it’s music that becomes the excuse for Totsuko to make friends with her — via a hilarious situation involving a white lie Totsuko blurts out of the blue. (She beats herself up continually for every tiny little untruth she tells, these snowball throughout the film, much to the audience’s amusement.)
The third person in the main trio is nerdy musician Rui Kagehira, the son of a doctor family who lives on a nearby island. He takes a ferry to the mainland to go shopping and attend cram school. Rui’s parents expect him to go to college, and eventually medical school, so that he can take over their clinic, telling him he’s “the only one who can do it”. Resigned to this future, nonetheless his true passion is music, and his enthusiasm at making a band with Totsuko and Kimi is infectious — he doesn’t even care that Rui’s only a beginner and Totsuko’s never played an instrument in her life.
What follows is a wonderfully funny, optimistic and life-affirming story about three “weird” kids whose burgeoning friendship help them process their difficulties via the sheer joy of making music together. Totsuko’s synesthesia isn’t even the main focus for the majority of the film — it’s definitely part of her, and there are plenty of subtle colour choices in the backgrounds and lighting to hint at its presence, but Yamada wisely makes her story about the characters rather than any specific condition.
Totsuko is an effervescent, energetic bundle of joy and anxiety, causing chaos and fun wherever she goes. She’s the kind of girl who spontaneously erupts into gleeful spinning dance at the slightest provocation. Whenever she’s on screen it’s almost impossible not to grin at her unselfconscious antics, whether she’s stringing together random nonsense lyrics or playing keyboard one-fingered, one key at at time. Her Catholic education and culture is an enormous part of her identity, and for once this isn’t portrayed negatively. Although the nuns are strict, they’re loving, supportive, forgiving, and understanding. The Catholic school setting is exquisitely portrayed, as is the movie generally — everything is so beautiful, with glowing colours, rich wood tones and shimmering nature.
While Kimi might at first appear to be one of those distant, snooty academic girls so often found in high school anime, she’s a much more complex and relatable character. Her friendship with Totsuko balances out the other girl’s silliness — although she’s serious and a little intense, she’s thoughtful and not above joining in Totsuko’s sometimes harebrained schemes. (Their attempted sleepover in the school dorms when everyone else is away on a trip is predictably disastrous.)
Rui reminds me a lot of indie movie God Help the Girl’s main male character, James. It’s also a film about a young man and two young women who make music together. (The soundtrack is by amazing Scottish band Belle and Sebastian. Check it out, you won’t regret it.) Rui just wants to make music, and have fun doing so. While Kimi favours guitar and Totsuko… sort of… plays keyboard, his instrument of choice is the theremin. Which is certainly a choice. He’s also a dab hand with the drum machine and piano himself, so he’s the anchor of the band. Interestingly, there’s no romantic tension here between any of the characters, so there aren’t any annoying lovers’ spats, or episodes of petty jealousy to get in the way of the fun. The things Totsuko says and does could almost be considered romantic attraction, if it wasn’t just Kimi’s and Rui’s colours she was so attracted to.
Composer Kensuke Ushio goes above and beyond with his incredibly important contribution to the movie’s impeccable vibe. For the practice sessions in the old abandoned church, Ushio went to the real location the movie building was based on, and recorded ambient sounds and calculated the reverberation and acoustics, so that the music would sound right. Now that’s dedication. During the later Ushio admitted that when it comes to music and tech, he’s an otaku (to cheers from the crowd). Totsuko, Kimi, and Rui’s band eventually gets to perform three songs, each one written by a different band member. Totsuko’s is almost certainly the most iconic, a New Order-inspired bop filled with borderline insane lyrics about planets, prayer, and noodles. Kimi’s track reveals a strong Happy Mondays influence, freely admitted by Ushio at the Q&A. Keep an ear out for a soft instrumental version of Underworld’s Born Slippy too!
While not as tearjerking as A Silent Voice, The Colors Within is a beautiful movie, and a generally excellent moviegoing experience. With complex, nuanced characters all trying to cope with their own individual problems, and a throughline of goofy humour and real heart, it’s certainly one of the very best of the nine movies shown this year at SLA. I’ll be back again soon with more SLA 2024 reviews, so keep an eye out for them!
The Colors Within
Director: Naoko Yamada
Screenplay: Reiko Yoshida
Character design: DaisukeRichard
Music: Kensuke Ushio
Studio: Science Saru
JP distributor: Toho
JP theatrical release: 30th August 2024
UK theatrical premiere: 2nd November 2024
Runtime: 101 minutes
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
BBFC rating: PG
