The Colours With­in review – hits with the pow­er of a dodgeball

The cre­ation of music works espe­cial­ly well as a device for films about teenagers find­ing them­selves. When per­form­ing, intro­vert­ed young­sters come out of their shells, con­nect­ing to oth­ers in ways they couldn’t have imag­ined. In Naoko Yamada’s won­der­ful new ani­ma­tion, The Col­ors With­in, con­nec­tion is key. It’s all about char­ac­ters drawn togeth­er through unusu­al cir­cum­stances, each unable to cat­e­gorise their feel­ings but all per­se­ver­ing to express what seems intan­gi­ble through song­writ­ing. What they can’t say with words, they can at least con­vey with synths.

Words prove tricky for describ­ing the con­ceit at play with the film’s pri­ma­ry pro­tag­o­nist, Tot­suko. A shy stu­dent at a Catholic girls’ school, she has the abil­i­ty to see peo­ple as colours. Each per­son has a dif­fer­ent aura, visu­alised as a water­colour mist, where con­sis­tent­ly-clever sound design aids in trans­lat­ing what every shade of red, yel­low or green might mean in her unique way of pro­cess­ing the world. This is one way in which the film can be read as a rumi­na­tion on neu­ro­di­ver­gent expe­ri­ence, though the colour-vision also direct­ly leads to a read­ing of the film as a queer awak­en­ing, in an envi­ron­ment where reli­gion and oth­er pres­sures sti­fle explo­ration of such feelings.

In what plays like a rom­com meet-cute, Tot­suko is so spell­bound by the beau­ti­ful blue aura emit­ting from school­mate Kimi that she takes an acci­den­tal dodge­ball to the face with glee. Kimi quits school for unre­lat­ed rea­sons, but Tot­suko tracks her to her job at a used book­store. Mak­ing awk­ward con­ver­sa­tion with her gui­tar-play­ing colour-crush, Tot­suko sug­gests a skill for piano that she doesn’t have, attract­ing the atten­tion of eaves­drop­ping boy Rui. Tot­suko fibs that she and Kimi have a band, Rui express­es a desire to col­lab­o­rate, and to Totsuko’s sur­prise, Kimi seems keen on actu­al­ly mak­ing this group a reality.

As they prac­tice at an unused church near Rui’s home, in secret from their fam­i­lies and teach­ers, music brings them togeth­er, even when their respec­tive abil­i­ties and musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties prove odd bed­fel­lows. But then again, you can’t find new shades for expres­sion with­out mix­ing very dif­fer­ent colours.

Yama­da has pri­or form with mak­ing musi­cal per­for­mances soar on screen, through her work on the K‑On! fran­chise and the gor­geous heart­break­er Liz and the Blue Bird. She and reg­u­lar com­pos­er col­lab­o­ra­tor Ken­suke Ushio weave bits of the kids’ orig­i­nal songs through­out the film, though the sheer euphor­ic ener­gy of their glo­ri­ous con­cert per­for­mance still sur­pris­es. Tot­suko says she wants to express Kimi’s colour through music, and the film’s finale absolute­ly hits with the pow­er of a dodge­ball to the face that still makes you beam uncontrollably.