‘The Colors Within’ Anime Film Review

Director Naoko Yamada has proven herself in the niche of lower-stakes, slice-of-life anime, with decades of experience in the industry and a reputation from both the international sensation A Silent Voice as well as multiple entries of the Sound Euphonium franchise. Her works are known for their ability to take simple premises and draw from them emotional explorations of youth and friendship. With her newest film The Colors Within, Yamada channels those emotional depths through the visual and pallet sensibilities of one of anime’s most visually bold studios, Science Saru, whose 2021 series The Heike Story she had previously worked on as director. The result is a charming display of music and color, a refreshing celebration of friendship and self-acceptance that ends up being perhaps Yamada’s most poetic project to date.

A World of Color

The film is framed around the experiences of Totsuko, a self-conscious Japanese high-schooler who can see the emotional “colors” radiated by others. When Totsuko finds herself inexplicably drawn to the rich blue color of Kimi, a girl who drops out of their private Japanese Catholic school to work at a used bookstore and hide her situation from her grandmother. When Totsuko is likewise drawn to the cool green hue of Rui, a boy preparing to leave his insular village to study medicine in college, the three of them decide to form a band in semi-secret that meets in an abandoned church on Rui’s island. Totsuko, given assurance by her bandmates as well as the soft affirmation of a school nun, begins to grow in her emotional expression and in turn inspire Kimi and Rui to honest dialogue with their own family lives. The group receives a big opportunity to perform, a chance that may ultimately result in Totsuko finally seeing her own color as well.

The plotline of The Colors Within is relatively light, and it relishes its atmospheric charms over any need for narrative urgency. An obvious thematic follow-up to A Silent Voice’s deaf protagonist is The Colors Within’s treatment of a protagonist with visual synesthesia. Elsewhere, the film teems with visual and audial motifs of the metronome clacking of a ball cradle and the colorful pegs of a sternhalma game indirectly playing off the themes of how Totsuko acts and reacts with those around her. It also has a quiet yet pronounced theme of spirituality; Totsuko is a Christian girl even going beyond the wider trappings of the film’s Catholic school setting, but this is just a part of her character that hardly presented as particularly unique or uncommon. Her “secret band” is hardly a taboo for her own beliefs or the structure around her, but that isn’t to say she doesn’t otherwise sneak some mischief past the nuns along the way.

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Sights and Sounds

While the film is bound to the realism of the everyday, the visual framing of Totsuko’s emotions through vivid colors and interior visions takes the film’s tone a bit closer to the lightly-fantastical wheelhouse of other anime auteurs like Makoto Shinkai or Keiichi Hara than to some of Yamada’s other works. “Bright” is a good way to describe the film’s visuals—the abstraction of Totsuko’s “colors within” are continuously presented in her mind, then realized in many playful ways such as the stained-glass of a window or paper banners fluttering through a seaside breeze. The deliberate art choices make it so that even an astronomy lesson being taught in a darkened classroom is somehow imbued with a sense of lightness, where the imaginative thoughtfulness of the characters and the physical world they inhabit become stylishly blended together.

Given the importance of the characters’ band, the sound and music of The Colors Within is naturally of importance. Composer Kensuke Ushio is a veteran of previous projects from both Saru (Devilman Crybaby, The Heike Story, Dan Da Dan) and Yamada (A Silent Voice, Liz and the Blue Bird), and the resulting approach to The Colors Within is a blend of simple atmospheric listening that culminates in the light rock of a concert finale. Whereas various other anime films with musical subjects prioritize the determination and drive of their protagonists (2023’s Blue Giant, 2024’s Trapezium as obvious recent examples), The Colors Within frames the music as a simple act of self-expression, which is all it needs to be. As such, Yamada and Ushio end up “building up to” the characters’ own music to a point where the final performances feel like as much of a surprise to the film’s audience as they do to the in-movie crowd they play before.

The Beauty of the Everyday

While the movie leans very powerfully on its atmosphere and vibes, the very introspective tone ends up feeling somewhat light on characterization, especially with Totsuko’s friends Rui and Kimi. The film moves pretty quickly over them overcoming their own internal reservations towards each other, and all of their emotions are resolved really through self-reassurance rather than concrete plot growth, and an extra scene or two focusing on their own internal minds rather than Totsuko’s filtering of them would have made the whole character dynamics feel more relatable. That said, for a movie intended to bring out the naturalistic beauty of the everyday, The Colors Within excels at capturing a snapshot of time and drawing out its simple harmony.

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