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In the new anime film \u201cThe Colors Within,\u201d a teenage girl named Totsuko has the synesthetic ability to see people\u2019s \u201ccolors\u201d \u2014 their auras or spirits, expressed in vivid watercolor silhouettes. Totsuko encounters Kimi, a former classmate, and Rui, a college-bound music lover, and they end up forming a band. The film then plays like an extended vignette about the friendship that blooms among the three teens, but for all of its hues, \u201cThe Colors Within\u201d doesn\u2019t feel like a fully illustrated work.<\/p>\n
As the film begins Totsuko is attending a Christian boarding school with Kimi, a popular girl whose color is a mesmerizing electric blue. When Kimi suddenly drops out of the school, Totsuko searches her out, eventually discovering her practicing guitar while working at a secluded little bookstore. Shopping in the bookstore is Rui, a boy whose extensive studies for his future career in medicine don\u2019t deter him from his secret love for creating music. The three agree to compose and play songs together, using an old church on a remote island as a rehearsal space.<\/p>\n
The movie\u2019s action doesn\u2019t extend much further than that; though the band is, for each of the three nascent musicians, a small act of independence, even rebellion, \u201cThe Colors Within\u201d has such an aloof tone that the deeper motivations and stakes for each character, though alluded to, don\u2019t feel substantial enough to provide the story with any sense of urgency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Rui is quietly distant from his mother, who expects him to take over the family\u2019s medical clinic. Kimi hasn\u2019t told her grandmother, whom she lives with, that she has dropped out of school. And Totsuko, who once aspired to be a ballerina in the dance school her mother owns, now twirls through the halls on her own and tries to be the most respectful, devout student she can be. But \u201cThe Colors Within\u201d is more invested in their enthusiasm for making music together than in the shared feeling of alienation, and the platonic (and even, perhaps, romantic) interest that led them to one another in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
This musical slice-of-life anime recalls other coming-of-age musical films like \u201cOn-Gaku: Our Sound\u201d and series like \u201cCarole & Tuesday\u201d and \u201cYour Lie in April,\u201d though those three examples provide a more trenchant unpacking of their characters and whimsical displays of the music-making process than we find in \u2018The Colors Within.\u201d<\/p>\n
Likewise, there\u2019s a quiet, insular quality to the direction, by Naoko Yamada, that is at times beautifully evocative \u2014 especially when focused on the central characters\u2019 facial expressions \u2014 but at other times can veer toward the prosaic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Colors Within\u201d concludes with Totsuko, Kimi and Rui playing their original songs for a festival at Totsuko\u2019s school. In their final song, written primarily by Totsuko, they sing the playful nonsensical lyrics, \u201cSweet, kin planets up orbiting, amen!\u201d It\u2019s a lively \u2014 and infectiously catchy \u2014 electro-pop song, a quasi hymn of praise reflecting Totsuko\u2019s sense of faith as well as her affection for her bandmates and the music they make together. But when the concert \u2014 and the film \u2014 ends, there\u2019s little sense of resolution for these characters, how their lives will proceed, how their relationships have changed and what will happen to their band and the music they\u2019ve made together. For a movie in which people are colors and music is faith, \u201cThe Colors Within\u201d could do with a more expanded palette.<\/p>\n
The Colors Within<\/strong>
Rated PG. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n