AP – Kids movies so often bear little of the actual lived-in experience of growing up, but Yamada Naoko’s luminous anime The Colors Within gently reverberates with the doubts and yearnings of young life.
Totsuko (voiced by Suzukawa Sayu) is a student at an all-girls Catholic boarding school.
In the movie’s opening, she explained how she experiences colors differently. She feels colours more than sees them, like an aura she senses from another person. “When I see a pretty colour, my heart quickens,” she said.
Totsuko, an exuberant, uncensored soul, has the tendency to blurt things out before she quite intends to. She accidentally tells a woman that her colour is beautiful. In the midst of a dodgeball game, she’s transfixed by the purple and yellow blur of a volleyball hurtling toward her – so much so that she’s happily dazed when it smacks her in the head.
Like Totsuko, The Colors Within wears its heart on its sleeve. Painted with a light, watercolour-y brush, the movie is softly impressionistic. In one typically poetic touch, a slinky brush stroke shapes the contours of a hillside horizon.
That evocative sensibility connects with the movie’s spiritual underpinnings. Totsuko prays “to have the serenity to accept the things she can’t change”. In The Colors Within, a trio of young loners bond over what makes them uniquely themselves, while finding the courage to change, together.
The ball that knocks down Totsuko is thrown by a classmate named Kimi (Akari Takaishi), who not long after that gym class drops out of school – hounded, we’re told, by rumours of a boyfriend. (Boys are off-limits for the boarding school). Totsuko, curious what’s happened to Kimi, sets out to find her, and eventually does. At a local used bookstore, she sits working behind a desk, strumming her electric guitar.
To speak to Kimi, Totsuko grabs a piano book for an excuse. When a bespectacled boy named Rui (Kido Taisei) approaches and says he plays the theremin, Totsuko blurts out that they should start a band. They aren’t much more than strangers to each other, but they do – a group urged together by Totsuko’s earnest positivity and her instinct that they are suited to one another. (Totsuko sees blue for Kimi, green for Rui).
Despite their relatively scant experience (none in the case of Totsuko), the trio begin making music together. They practice in an old church near Rui’s home that Kimi and Totsuko take a ferry to get to. They don’t share much about their lives, but enough to know, roughly, what each is wrestling with.
Kimi hasn’t yet told her grandmother, who raised her, that she’s out of school. Rui, headed next year to college, loves music but has parents who expect a different professional path.
But much goes unspoken in The Colors Within. If there’s a character who voices what isn’t articulated, it’s the kindly Sister Hiyoshiko (Yui Aragaki), the nun with the “beautiful” colour. As she subtly encourages them, it’s clear that her sense of guidance and atonement goes beyond school policy. “We can chart a new course any time we wish,” she said.
But much of what matters in The Colors Within isn’t said aloud. It comes, like Totsuko’s feelings of colour, through an essence of character that, regardless of any missteps or disappointments by these three young people, emerges loud and clear in music. Are they songs? Or hymns?
Either way, in the climactic concert, Naoko, the filmmaker of 2016’s A Silent Voice, allows all the dialogue to subside and let their music do the talking. And it rocks. – Jake Coyle
