The Colors Within Captures the Everyday Magic of Music

When people hear the word “anime,” certain images tend to come to mind: Spiky-haired dudes chucking ki blasts at each other, superpowered pirates sailing the high seas, warriors battling demons with flaming swords, and other maximalist battle-oriented spectacles. But of course, there’s much more to this medium than just burly guys slugging it out (although that can admittedly be quite fun), and one of the best examples of this is the work of director Naoko Yamada. Yamada has made a career out of focusing on the little details, as evidenced by her output at the acclaimed studio Kyoto Animation (K-On!, A Silent Voice, Liz and the Blue Bird, and more). Under the magnifying glass of her compositions, each small gesture takes on added significance, blowing up quotidian concerns to match the larger-than-life emotions of adolescence.
Yamada’s latest, The Colors Within, feels like a logical progression of these tendencies, an animated film about teens that is so attuned to its characters that it finds poetry in everyday moments of connection. It’s about music and the way it can tie people together. It’s about the impermanence of the present and the inevitability of high school coming to an end. It’s about discovering the things that make you, you. On the one hand, not much really happens. But in that absence of “stuff happening,” there are sequences so specific and painstakingly rendered, that these particulars cross over into the universal. If you’ve bounced off Yamada’s output in the past, this flick will probably do little to convince you otherwise, but for fellow fans of this introspective style, her latest has that same deft touch.
The story follows Totsuko Higurashi (Sayu Suzukawa), a high school student attending an all-girls Christian academy in Japan. In many ways, she’s perfectly ordinary. She is doing well enough in school, has a group of close friends, and is a devout Christian like most of her classmates. However, she has a secret: she sees other people as colors. The silhouettes of those around her are filled in with orange, green, and purple splotches. But while her peers have such vibrant colors, for whatever reason, she can’t see her own. One day, Totsuko gets so sucked in by her classmate Kimi Sakunaga’s (Akari Takaishi) dazzling shade of blue that she resolves to get to know her better. Kimi drops out of school, but Totsuko tracks her down to a used bookstore, and after struggling to explain why she followed her there, ends up stumbling into forming a band with Kimi and a gentle boy named Rui Kagehira (Taisei Kido). As the trio practice to participate in a festival at Totsuko’s school, they slowly get to know each other’s problems through music.
Much like how Totsuko’s condition allows her to see the otherwise unremarkable events through a different lens, the film finds magic in commonplace happenings thanks to its sumptuous aesthetic execution. A few years ago, Yamada joined Science Saru, a studio behind some of the most visually experimental anime in recent years, like Ping Pong the Animation, Devilman Crybaby, Your Hands Off Eizouken!, and more. But since joining Science Saru to direct Heike Story and now The Colors Within, Yamada has turned the studio’s explosions of creativity inward, channeling this fervor into subtle character animation that wordlessly communicates what’s just beneath the surface.
Here, bodily motions are portrayed with a fluidity and weight that captures the shape of real movement: fingers flex with the tension of plucking guitar strings, legs restlessly shift in discomfort, and a dress gracefully twirls during an impromptu dance sequence. Although this mode of animation is very technically difficult and decidedly less flashy than what you’ll see in whatever big Shonen Jump adaptation that’s currently airing, this style has long been the bread and butter of Yamada’s old stomping ground, Kyoto Animation, and she’s entirely translated this feel to her latest studio. It’s an approach that pairs perfectly with this film’s quiet narrative ambitions, the emphasis on particulars making each little change in these characters’ lives pop.
Shortly after our main trio forms their band—which is more of a side hobby than a make-it-or-break-it career aspiration—their underlying anxieties come to the fore. Perhaps most pressingly, Kimi dropped out of school without telling her grandmother. Rui loves music but keeps it to himself because he knows his parents expect him to become a doctor and take over their family practice one day. Meanwhile, Totsuko has never told anyone about her condition and is unable to see her own colors due to missing some vital piece of self-actualization.
This isn’t a story about trying to play in sold-out arenas or becoming the next music sensation; it’s about how performance can act as a bridge between people, letting these three teens get to know each other and themselves in the process. They practice, brainstorm, and spill their guts for their tiny setlist, the warmth and escapism they find in each other coming across in every beaming smile and gorgeously animated performance. It also helps that the film is gifted with an enveloping coziness thanks to its soft color palette, charming character designs, and lived-in backdrops (like a deeply comfy bookstore, cute cat included). The whole “every frame a painting” thing may be a played out turn-of-phrase at this point, but it rings true here thanks to how deliberately everything is framed.
And it all builds towards a climax that, although still grounded and understated, feels like a veritable explosion of emotional catharsis compared to the rest of the picture’s relative restraint. In a particularly clever turn, we never actually hear our central band play a full song until their live show in the closing minutes, which allows the finale to deliver a very nice surprise: their music is great! Each track is a sonic snapshot of who these characters are and how far they’ve come, paralleling their growth in a beautifully animated sequence that captures the joy of performance.
All things considered, The Colors Within is admittedly deeply Yamada-core, a culmination of a grounded aesthetic forwarded by both her and her long-time screenwriting counterpart, Reiko Yoshida, which takes more inspiration from documentary filmmaking and Ozu than the blood-pumping theatrics of battle-shonen. Having read plenty of criticism of her previous work, it’s an approach that seems to have caused a lot of confusion: Isn’t the point of animation to fuel spectacles that would be impossible in live-action? If you’re going to focus on minute, human details, why not just film real actors?
However, what these kinds of questions miss is that The Colors Within and much of Yamada’s work isn’t recreating the world in 1:1 detail but instead using animation to conjure the spirit of day-to-day existence. Motions are smooth but intentionally exaggerated in small ways that make each movement stand out. By comparison, rotoscoping (when animation is created by tracing real-world actors) often looks unnatural and strange because despite being more “accurate,” it falls into the uncanny valley; after all, the point of art isn’t to perfectly reflect reality but to capture its essence. In this case, Yamada and Science Saru evoke the bubbling, tumultuous soul of adolescence so accurately that despite numerous flourishes, it all feels quite true.
Admittedly, there are a few places where the film’s subtle approach ends up feeling a tad slight, like when it comes to the unfulfilled hints of romance between bandmates, including Totsuko’s seeming affections towards Kimi, or in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it character resolutions. But even with these shortcomings, Yamada and Science Saru’s latest is an empathetic coming-of-age tale that leverages animation firepower to eulogize connections born from music. The result is a tone piece that celebrates the little things that would otherwise go ignored, finding magic in both music and the process of growing up.
Director: Naoko Yamada
Writer: Reiko Yoshida
Stars: Akari Takaishi, Sayu Suzukawa, Taisei Kido, Yui Aragaki
Release date: Jan. 24, 2025
Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.