Anime director Naoko Yamada knows her way around stories about music. She directed more than 40 episodes of K-On! and worked as series production director for Sound! Euphonium, both shows about high school students in bands. (A light music band and a concert band, respectively.) When both those series got spinoff movies, she worked on those as well, including directing K-On! The Movie and the Sound! Euphonium film Liz and the Blue Bird. So her newest movie, The Colors Within — also about a group of teenagers who form a band — isn’t a huge narrative leap for her.
But The Colors Within — coming to IMAX for a one-day preview on Jan. 23, ahead of a Jan. 24 theatrical release — is less about the music and more about three lonely teens who come together. It’s a quiet, contemplative movie where most of the driving forces are subtle and understated, made evocative by the animation, which is mostly grounded save for an occasional, deliberate splash of color.
[Ed. note: This post contains slight setup spoilers for The Colors Within.]
The movie follows high school student Totsuko Higurashi, who has a type of synesthesia where she sees particular emotions and people as colors. She’s drawn to her classmate Kimi Sakunaga, whose color manifests as a beautiful light blue. (In fact, Totsuko is so distracted by Kimi’s lovely hue that when Kimi tosses a dodgeball at her in gym class, Totsuko forgets to dodge, and it smacks her in the face.) Totsuko is dismayed when Kimi drops out of their all-girls Catholic school, but she finds her again, now working in a bookstore. As they make small talk, a boy named Rui (who has a calming green aura) approaches and asks whether they’re in a band.
Flustered, Totsuko claims they are. Although she awkwardly backtracks, Rui and Kimi decide they want to join this nonexistent band. The three of them end up meeting in an abandoned church that Rui quietly maintains in his free time. Rui collects instruments, but particularly loves the theremin. Kimi plays guitar, and Totsuko gradually learns the piano and tries her hand at songwriting, specifically trying to capture how Kimi and Rui’s colors make her feel.
Unlike K-On! or Bocchi the Rock!, another series about unlikely bandmates coming together, The Colors Within doesn’t focus as much on the trials and tribulations of learning their instruments, or the band trying to make it. They do play music together, with each of them taking a stab at songwriting. But the driving force isn’t the band’s success. Instead, the band is a vehicle for these three characters coming together, slowly opening up to one another.
Kimi hasn’t told her grandmother that she dropped out of school, for instance, and she’s still ashamed about that. Rui hides his love of music from his mother, who expects him to become a doctor and continue operating his small island town’s clinic, as his family has done for generations. Totsuko sparks to both of them in a way she doesn’t with her other classmates. All of them hide the band from their other connections for various reasons, but it’s clear they find a refuge with each other that they don’t have with anyone else.
What makes The Colors Within work so well is how the naturalistic animation combined with the specific set-pieces and situations create such a distinct feeling and atmosphere. There are just so many gorgeous, evocative moments where the movie lingers: Kimi’s forlorn reflection in a set of Newton balls; the slightly fuzzy city lights behind Totsuko’s hand as she waves goodbye to Kimi; Rui’s sneakers on the snow-covered steps of the church, shifting as he calls his mother. All the small details contribute to a feeling of soft loneliness that slowly lessens as the characters grow closer and closer.
That grounded naturalism also lets Totsuko’s moments of color shine. Whenever she experiences something particularly powerful or catches sight of someone particularly memorable, the movie shifts to gorgeous streaks and swirls of color. It isn’t overdone: Yamada uses this device just enough to emphasize particular moments that might not even seem big to the outside eye. To Totsuko, though, seeing those swaths of color indicates something special.
When these three lonely teenagers find solace in each other, they in turn find the strength to open up to others. Even then, those confessions, for lack of a better word, aren’t big dramatic moments, but subtler, more realistic interactions. The big school festival Totsuko and the band play — in what would be a tense, substantial climax in most anime stories — is simply a celebration of the music they make together and the friendship they’ve found through it. That all hits even harder because of the way their closeness slowly builds up throughout the movie — subtly, softly, and barely there, until it’s impossible to ignore.
The Colors Within will be released in IMAX theaters on Jan. 23 and hits wide release in America on Jan. 24. Special NYC screenings with director Q&As start Jan. 21.
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