Make Your Own Kind of Music
By Juan Barquin
The Colors Within
Dir. Naoko Yamada, Japan, GKIDS
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: teens come together to play music and slowly come to terms with their identities and futures. This is something of a staple in Japanese literature, which should be no surprise to anyone who has enjoyed any number of series—Yuki Kodama’s Apollo on the Slope, Shinichi Ishizuka’s Blue Giant, Aki Hamazi’s Bocchi the Rock!, Ayano Takeda’s Sound! Euphonium, and Kakifly’s K-On!, among many others—or their animated adaptations. K-On! was adapted by filmmaker Naoko Yamada during her time at Kyoto Animation, a studio that specialized in, as writer Dani Cavallaro wrote in her critical study, “the wonders and quandaries of ordinary life.” Yamada’s work luxuriates in the mundane and the playful, the kind of film of which a less imaginative critic might say, “Nothing really happens.” Her fixation on the desires and daily lives of teen girls makes her easy to dismiss by those accustomed to watching “slice of life” anime about schoolgirls. But it is these details—moments when characters simply study or share snacks while revealing more of themselves to each other and the audience—that bring her work to life.
There is a similar quiet beauty to the way that Naoko Yamada approaches her new film, The Colors Within (Kimi no Iro). In her work, Yamada's formal touches mimic her characters’ emotional states. In this case, it’s Totsuko, a whirlwind of a young woman who sees people as colors, which Yamada depicts by shifting from more traditionally structured animation into softly surreal frames with patches of watercolor and colored pencil etchings melting together. This fanciful figure is drawn to a former classmate, Kimi, and a boy named Rui, through their interest in music and the way their “colors” mesh. As in the aforementioned works, the trio comes together to play and write music in order to navigate the difficulties in their lives.
With The Colors Within, Yamada trades in the leisurely pacing of K-On! for a condensed narrative. Working from her first original feature script—her past films were adapted from manga (A Silent Voice) or spun off from anime (Liz and the Blue Bird)—Yamada has created a film in which the fleeting nature of time is felt with each passing season, and there’s a warmth to her animation that complements her humanism. She never succumbs to lazy montages of rehearsals or any such nonsense, instead reveling in scenes of her characters bonding in rooms flooded with light, whether from golden hour at school or candlelight in a cold church. Her filmmaking has a patience, unlike the work of more brash filmmakers like Makoto Shinkai or Mamoru Hosoda, though she’s no less committed to striking an ideal balance between realism and flourishes of fantasy. And this extends to the writing, with Yamada showing no need to overstate anything about the characters and their lives, leaning into the emotional baggage that comes with obligation and expectation, imbuing each frame and sound with the sensation of any given feeling.
Just as Totsuko, Kimi, and Rui are often pushed to the edges of the frame in their isolation, the camera homes in on their eyes and hands, pulling focus from their environment and emphasizing minute expressions and physical gestures. Each of these nuanced visual cues are tied to Kensuke Ushio’s musical compositions for the film, each as playful and curious as the characters themselves. Every bit of the elaborately designed ambient soundscape emphasizes the emotional beats of the narrative, always weaving each of the characters’ instruments (guitar, theremin, and piano) into Ushio’s score. This intentional design even extends to the three original songs for the film (“Walk,” “Apology Letter–The Good, The True, The Beautiful,” and the irresistible “Amen, I’m Going Somewhere”), written in-universe by each individual band member, with hymn-like lyrics that cut right to the feeling (“I send to you, standing right there, a real song of love that I tuned,” “Your colors cut through my mind,” “You and I, in this universe, we’re drifting until the end”) and samples one might expect from teen musicians (Underworld’s “Born Slippy .NUXX” and New Order’s “Blue Monday” among them).
Despite its wide-eyed wonder, The Colors Within is never naïve. Perhaps its most mature feature is the way it folds in faith. It may initially seem to be a mere aesthetic choice, but Totsuko’s home being a Catholic boarding school reflects something deeper: there’s an intimacy to the way such gestures help the film navigate the concept of faith, not simply in a higher power but in one’s self. Though less a staple of religion than one of recovery, The Serenity Prayer (“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference”) is wielded by Yamada as something of a thesis. Such words spell out the journey that comes with growing up, but they also serve as a reminder that life, at any point (including for the film’s adults), requires a willingness to adapt and challenge one’s perceptions of the world around them.
In a well-trod genre that too often falls back on unearned “universality,” Yamada’s work feels genuinely of a piece with a film like Stephen Cone’s Princess Cyd in its maturity, tenderness, and engagement with faith, queerness, and the fraught notion of self-discovery at any age. Her slices of life focus on the nuances of human connection and interaction, building upon the comfort of finding solace in others throughout the narrative. If A Silent Voice fixated on navigating guilt for one’s past and Liz and the Blue Bird tapped into the anxieties of love, The Colors Within is all about balancing the expectations others have of us with the limitless possibilities that exist before we are pigeonholed in certain roles, like the negative perception associated with dropping out of school for Kimi or Rui’s family pressuring him to go into medicine which keeps his love of music closeted. Just as Totsuko, Kimi, and Rui’s modest ambition—of creating art that reveals one’s true self and connects with those who experience it—is fulfilled through their music, so is Yamada’s through her film.