[Week 5] The Colors Within

For the film club I do with friends, I'm picking a series of works by Japanese animator Naoko Yamada, whose new film The Colors Within released in the US recently. I've previously done a series on Mobile Suit Gundam, and because my friends are not well versed in the cultural context around Japanese animation, I preceded each selection with a short essay introducing the work and explaining some relevant cultural context. I'm doing that again with Yamada's works, and like with the Gundam series, I figured I could adapt these for my blog as well.

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For our (much-delayed) final stop on the Yamada train, we'll be watching The Colors Within (2024), her latest film which released in American theaters earlier this year. Unlike most of Yamada's films, which adapt or extend existing works, this is an original story by Yamada and her perennial collaborator, screenwriter Reiko Yoshida.

The Japanese title, Kimi no Iro. is usually translated as "Your Color", which tracks with my extremely rudimentary Japanese. Iro is color, no is possessive, and kimi is a casual intimate form of the pronoun "you". But there's also a character in the film named Kimi, so I think there's some wordplay, and the title also means "Kimi's Color". Not gonna lie: I'm extremely proud of myself for noticing this double meaning all on my own, in a language I don't really speak.

And With Your Spirit

The Colors Within is set in a Catholic school in Nagasaki, the kind of setting rarely explored in Japanese media. I'm intrigued to see how the film will portray Christianity, given that less than 1% of Japan's population is Christian. Most are not religious at all, and among those who are, Christianity is a distant third to Buddhism and Shinto. In an interview with Deadline, Yamada explained that she picked the Catholic school as a setting because she wanted the protagonist Totsuko to have "a strong sense of belief". Christianity seems an apt choice for that, compared to Buddhism and Shinto, which often focus more on ritual practice than professions of faith. Speaking to AnimeNewsNetwork, Yamada commented that she hoped the film's treatment of Catholicism might make it more culturally accessible to western nations where Christian teachings and traditions were more familiar.

As usual, the film features teen musicians. We've seen in previous projects that Yamada likes to explore music as a pastime, a professional adaptation, and a means of forging individual connection. But in The Heike Story, Biwa's music was used a little differently, evoking a connection to the cultural history of the literary epic. I'll be curious to see if music is tied to culture here as well, to explore themes related to faith and belonging. I was raised Catholic in a church with a pretty good choir, so the connection between music and spiritual community seems like fertile ground to me.

Paint With All The Colors Of The Mind

In Animation Magazine, Yamada described the characters of The Colors Within as "children who can’t express their worries and secrets." Yamada remains preoccupied as ever with the limits of verbal communication. In interviews, Yamada has often remarked that she struggles to articulate her thoughts verbally, and a post about her on Sakuga Blog reports that colleagues have described her as a woman of few words: "never overbearing with precise commands despite having an extremely calculated vision." (Shout out to Sakuga Blog, whose translations and essays have been an invaluable resource in writing these introductions).

Yamada has often used sonic and visual metaphor to explore themes of isolation and connection. Recall Mizore from Liz and the Blue Bird, whose painfully bottled emotions find expression only through her oboe solo. Or Shōya, from A Silent Voice, who saw an X drawn over the faces of those he couldn't look in the eye. In The Colors Within, Totsuko sees colorful auras associated with particular music, people, and feelings.

In an Anime Corner interview, Yamada clarified that she doesn't see this as representing a diagnosable condition like synesthesia, but as a metaphor for the uniqueness of Totsuko's perspective:

It’s not like she has any brain differences or anything of the sort. I just want people to think, to see it as is, to accept her as is. [...] Maybe the audience might think they also have some specific way that they see others.

This approach might reflect Japanese cultural sensitivities about neurodivergence, mental illness, and disability. As Columnist John Oppliger has noted, traits like sensory processing differences, repetitive behaviors, and unconventional communication styles often appear in anime as lighthearted characterization, but specific acknowledgement of neurodivergence is rarer, out of a desire not to offend or stigmatize. When rendered in a lighthearted way, these personality "quirks" are often used to endear the (presumed male otaku) audience to a female character. In other words, to evoke the moe response.

Mountains Out Of Moe Hills

And so, for my closing statement on Yamada's work, it all comes back to moe. As so many things do.

I recently read an interview with Yamada and screenwriter Reiko Yoshida, about K-On!. Yamada explains that that project was the first time she ever really felt connected to the moe response. However, Yoshida added that "K-On! mostly only has female characters appear in it. And yet, [Yamada's] thoughts were not about making it focused on moe but instead making its theme about adolescence [...]  For me, I wanted them to appear more than just being cute; I wanted them to feel alive".

In the K-On! episode we watched, "Another Training Camp!", the characters Asuza and Ui gossip about Yui, who is Asuza's bandmate and Ui's older sister. Asuza doesn't share Ui's affection for Yui: she finds her lazy and weird, prone to strange sensory aversions (for instance, a dislike of air conditioning) and odd social interactions. Over the course of the episode, Asuza gains more of an appreciation for Yui: she's impressed by Yui's perfect pitch and is surprised to find that Yui, who she thought of as a slacker, practices with unpredictable bursts of dedication at odd hours.

It's not surprising that some autistic fans of K-On! see themselves represented in Yui. I've also read neurodivergent readings of Mizore from Liz and the Blue Bird and Shōya from A Silent Voice. Viewers point out a variety of traits to justify these readings: hyperfixation on special interests, repetitive speech and behavior, unusual styles of socializing and communication, sensory processing difficulties.

When these are reduced to moe tropes, these are objectifying. They serve as product differentiators, prompting otaku to select their preferred waifu or Best Girl from lists of stock anime love interest character types. Yamada doesn't steer clear of this, she dives right in and then delves deeper. She at once embraces and transcends these light, charming quirks, recasting them as features of a deeply personal inner experience. Each of us has our own internal world, and our perceptions and perspectives may not be similar to those of others, but Yamada invites us to understand them on their own terms.

This Week

We're watching The Colors Within, which is, as of this posting, available from fine etailers everywhere.

Yikes! I took much longer to post this final installment of the Yamada series than I'd expected to. We watched the film back when it hit theaters in the US, and by now it's available on demand from various services. I recommend it highly, I think it ended up being my favorite of Yamada's film works, an opinion shared by several members of my film club. One of the members of our film club, Kayti Burt, interviewed Yamada for Rolling Stone, and it's highly worth a read!

Thanks to anyone who read these posts, I hope I intrigued you to check out some cool anime from Yamada!