The Colors Within (2024)

The best moment in Liz and the Blue Bird is near the end, when we see the main character from the first-person perspective of another character.  Something similar happens in The Colors Within.  The difference is that in Liz and the Blue Bird, the transmission of a new perspective is the climax, something the characters need to get past acute stress; in The Colors Within, it serves a similar purpose, but it's not as big of a surprise.  From early on, we know that Totsuko, who sees people as projecting colorful "auras," hopes to write a song to convey the feeling she gets from her friend Kimi's color. 

The film is about Totsuko, Kimi, and Rui forming a band and writing their own original songs.  There are other details, of course.  Totsuko lives in the dormitories of a Catholic school, goes to pray alone in the chapel every day, and forms a bond with Sister Hiyoko, one of the nuns on the staff.  Kimi was a student at that school, but drops out and is concerned about how her family will react.  Rui hides his music-making from his family because he fears they won't approve of him devoting his time to something other than his studies.  But explaining the details risks overstating the narrative thrust of The Colors Within.  

That is to say the film is not especially focused on these elements.  The backgrounds of the conflicts are not explained in detail, and it's not clear what most of what we're seeing means for any kind of resolution.  There is a similar yearning here to what we see in Yamada's other films, but it's less sad and less specific.  Totsuko yearns to befriend people with beautiful colors and to know her own color, but it doesn't depress her; Kimi and Rui yearn to be able to reveal themselves fully to their families, but the issues do not develop much beyond their feeling guilty and stuck, and they never become central conflicts.  The film mostly depicts other things, moments where they encounter some feeling or piece of knowledge they decide to incorporate into their art, start to let someone in, find something they want to say, or play around with the tools they want to use to express themselves. 

They find these things in all kinds of places, which is where Yamada's eclecticism comes in.  Totsuko's memories are grainy footage accompanied by film-reel sound; a school presentation about the movement of the solar system is presented in crude CGI on a classroom projector.  Totsuko's visions come in shots with colored filters or flickering watercolor strokes that flow and bend against abstract white backgrounds.  Certain physical details of the world they find themselves in are portrayed with exceptional care--candle flames, Totsuko's dress billowing as she happily spins, the careful gestures of a theremin player, water from a garden fountain, patches of sunlight that narrow to slivers as the day passes.  There are also observantly playful bits, like a match cut from a Newton's Cradle to tomatoes growing from a vine.  To give something this much attention in animation naturally tends to mark it as "special," since someone had to render every piece of it.  

A friend of mine says title character of Jean-Pierre Melville's Leon Morin, Priest, becomes freer than the other characters in Melville's films because of his religious beliefs.  Unlike others, he isn't burdened by uncertainty over what matters or what is worthwhile.  In this film, Sister Hiyoko and Totsuko experience something similar in their religion.  They sense that even little things they do are important and that there's something valuable out in the world, or in other people, for them to find.  Totsuko becomes doubly committed when Sister Hiyoko tells her that as long as her songs are sincerely about the good, the beautiful, and the true, they're "hymns."

Take any of Yamada's films and describe just the story, especially this one, and it might sound inconsequential.  But it's like when people criticize the ending of Jaws for being unrealistic.  That scene is impressive because it's unrealistic but makes you believe it anyway.  Everything other than the story in this film is here to convince you that the people and things you're seeing are worth attaching to even if nothing very "consequential" is happening.  

Like some TV series Yamada has worked on, and plenty of other anime about students playing music, The Colors Within is reminiscent of Nobuhiro Yamashita's film Linda Linda Linda, a film about a high school band who loses a member and invites a foreign student to join them.  Linda Linda Linda opens with some amateur video footage of a student making grandiose statements about the importance of high-school-age life, and being interrupted with a remark from the cameraman, telling us the lines are scripted.  There is a distancing effect here; surely it can't matter as much as the student says it does.  

But we find that it matters because it doesn't matter.  The stakes are low, so when the characters branch out, it's because something intrinsically drew them in.  When they create something out of this material, it leaves an indelible impression of a more pleasing world. 

Such a vision is also present in Zeinabu irene Davis's Compensation.  The characters in that film face serious problems, but there is one scene where they enjoy themselves together on the beach; it's a moment where they have no need at all to be self-conscious, where they can experience the way life could be in a better world. 

The performance in The Colors Within becomes something like this vision, as the result of the characters' artistic process, the process in which they got to see themselves through someone else's eyes and learned to see the world in lovingly-rendered textures and movements.  Kimi's songs sublimate her unsure feelings, if only temporarily, using the sliding notes of the theremin and guitar amp feedback; Totsuko's song shares her enchantment with the world and it serves as an invitation to all the other characters to take a moment to feel lighter, unburdened.  The melody gets Sister Hiyoko to start spinning like Totsuko did, with the same billowing motion. 

And it works because of some of the hallmarks of Yamada's work, where we see characters up close, so that their bodies are mostly out of frame.  We see the secret gestures they make behind their backs or secret expressions they have when they think no one is looking.  There are things people do that they themselves don't see or think about.  Sister Hiyoko unconsciously handles a rosary in her pocket under stress.  Part of the reason these films are so interested in sharing perspectives is because a lot is going on inside any person's head that most cannot see, and a lot that we project to the world without realizing it from behind our own eyes.

There are also false camera effects in shots with lens flare, or which shift in and out of short focus, or which even use fake film grain, as if the film itself is tweaking its mode of expression as the characters do when practicing their songs or using audio editing software.  They serve as reminders that the perception of secret things and sensory pleasures in this film comes from looking at the world by playing with cameras, instruments, and audio files.