Director: Naoko Yamada
The condition synaesthesia is not something often explored in drama and film, and despite an early work from playwright James Graham, Naoko Yamada’s new anime movie, The Colors Within, is a rare exploration of those who feel colours. Set in a teenage world of friendship, burgeoning adult emotion and school rules, synaesthesia is not the substance of the story, but it offers the animators a chance to explore colour splodges and the presentation of dreamy auras that co-protagonist Totsuko can see as her view of the world is shared with the viewer.
Totsuko becomes interested in fellow student Kimi but very soon Kimi has dropped out of school without telling her mother and started to work at a bookshop in the city where the innocent Totsuko tracks her down. Sharing a love of music, the new friends also meet Rui who forms a third for their band, but each member has lots of brand-new life choices to make and family pleasures to live up to.
Naoko Yamada’s 95-minute film offers an interesting way into the story through Totsuko’s synaesthesia that makes the wide-eyed schoolgirl both self-conscious and nervous of the world around her, isolating her from the other pupils. The setting at an all-girls’ Catholic School is potentially interesting and certainly an unusual one for anime, but it never proves integral to the story or Totsuko’s experience of her condition. Although the school is run by nuns who support both pupils in different ways, there is no reference to Christianity or religious belief, how that shapes or provides a rebellion point against who these young adults are turning out to be or even that Totsuko’s synaesthesia equates with a semi-religious experience. That feels like a missed opportunity in what is a largely boarding school drama.
Instead, The Colors Within is a sweet if rather undynamic tale of teen friendship and connection that has influence from American coming-of-age stories in the feeling of three displaced youngsters finding solace with each other and much of the middle part of the film is them meeting up to rehearse but really to talk, break into each other’s rooms at night and hangout as much as they can. What the film ultimately has to say about that stage of life is unremarkable, although the impetus for self-acceptance is there throughout the characterisation.
There is a lightness to Naoko Yamada’s animation that revels in the colours and, as ever with anime, the outdoor world of plants and flowers as well as the qualities of sunlight that affect Totsuko’s view of the city. A stronger narrative and an opportunity to pull together all these disparate threads about family, religion and the connection to Totsuko’s synaesthesia would make this a stronger reflection on a rarely considered condition.
The Colors Within is released exclusively in cinemas from 31st January.