The Colors Within

The Colours Within is in many ways an unconventional approach to a standard and understood subject matter. Director Naoko Yamada’s best known works (A Silent Voice, Liz and the Blue Bird) operate under the Aristotelian currency of pain and catharsis, which marks a clear separation to her work within TV anime, which closer resemble similar moves towards the means of catharsis, but without the pain or dramatic grandeur that other narratives choose to incorporate. In consideration of these two categories, The Colours Within fails to fit into either, it includes base-level resemblances to iyashikei works like K-On, but it is wholly disinterested in providing thesame sort of narrative structure as any such example within that genre. It is a remarkable instance of a work that values and emphasises a heightened sense of interiority, without moving towards overt expressionism or metaphor. One significant point that can facilitate interpreting The Colours Within comes from the philosopher Taki Koji, who stated that the act of photography is “an attempt at overcoming vision itself.” Rather than taking the approach of a more standard form of continuity editing, the film is immediately recognisable for its embedding of its cinematography via its first-person narrator of Totsuko, whose specifically idiosyncratic interpretation of the world around her is reflected by the fact that she is able to see a select few people as embodied by certain, specific colours, unique to each individual. It is an ability that is only ever dealt with in relatively abstract terms (and does not lead to a trite apocalypse plot where she has to use her special powers, as with the later works of Makoto Shinkai), but it is only one of several ways in which the film’s visual language and tone articulates itself. On a structural level, compositing (and by extension, proxemics and use of colour tones) is the material essence that defines animation, and it is in this area that The Colours Within is most effective in its direction; for a film that deals with relatively few locations, it is nonetheless able to create an expansive sense of scale within its cinematography, and to make each individual shot evocative and interesting to look at. The colour palette within the film’s backgrounds and locales makes an extensive use of lighter pastel tones, representing a form of lighting that is stylised but naturalistic in its form, a point that specifically contrasts the natural lighting within most scenes to the colours produced from Totsuko’s own perspective. Though long-time Yamada fans will be delighted to find that the film does include leg shots, added to the standard directorial mode is an uncharacteristically large number of establishing shots of still life or empty buildings that do not contain any characters within the frame. Although this may seem to be a form of homage or reference to Yasujiro Ozu, it remains distinct in its own right due to the differentiating context between the two. Ozu’s work is more presently occupied with the mechanisms of domestic drama, and he specifically makes use of quieter moments to serve as a form of contrast, deliberately drawing attention to the fact that the camera chooses to focus on a specific area that seems unrelated to the given scene. More critically, to interpret this specific technique as either a direct reference, or a means of moving the same method into a new context to try and achieve the same effect, would be a reductionist approach. The specific intentions of The Colours Within, and the manner in which it conveys and executes those ideas, is something that does not permit a simple comparison, especially when Koji and Ozu’s works both came from the Shōwa era, with its completely separate understanding of shared values and the master narrative compared to the 21st century. But the element of greater importance as concerns The Colours Within’s hyperspecifity is that it operates on a subterranean level. Unlike most works that try and incorporate more unconventional narrative forms, it is not an exercise in postmodernity or Brechtian thought, but rather, a means of using the sublime and all that it encompasses to create a contained iconography that is able to operate without the constraints that typically accompany a more standard form of narrative structure. Further, instead of taking a somewhat standard approach of utilising the environment (particularly as concerns the establishing shots) to be viewed purely as an extension of the main character and their current emotions, the film manages to produce a world that is clearly being interpreted and seen through Totsuko, but with a more multi-layered approach to introspection that extends beyond their own singular perspective, and the convergence of both the inner self and the outside world, each with distinct visual language, manages to enhance the feeling and cinematic strength of both items. While there are some films in which the city it takes place in can be seen as a character in its own right, The Colours Within takes this premise and moves it in a different direction, as the mere presence of colour itself is akin to a character, one with its own mood and feeling that changes in response to the other characters. With all this in mind, although there is plenty that can be said about the use of colour and cinematography, and it is inarguably the film’s most striking and evidently focused element, the film’s general characterisation is one point that should not be overlooked. Naturalistic is the descriptor that is most appropriate for the characters in the film, but within this general framework, it is significant that it manages to be a film about character that contains values, rather than the other way around – it is too often the case that even dramatists working under this deliberate framework think about values, and how characters are meant to fit into and represent those values, before thinking about how they are supposed to exist as properly realised individuals. The Colours Within manages to avoid this issue by virtue of the aforementioned colour scheme and cinematography, forming a representation of the disorder that comes from adolescence, and trying to adhere to the value systems of all sorts of different people, whilst still trying to figure yourself out in the process. It has elements of humour, thoughtful intensity, and all the points in-between that characterise the moments of any portrait of domestic life, and is able to navigate through these points with remarkable finesse, maintaining this tonal consistency by never growing overbearing with its moves towards character development, it is a film that clearly demonstrates a recognition of the fact that what isn’t said is just as important as what is. The focus on body language and proxemics across the film allows these disparate elements to coalesce with and complement the emotional impact of each other, rather than acting as points of tonal contrast or difference. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said that “To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived”, which is a point that seems to perfectly encapsulate The Colours Within and its overarching philosophy, a film in which there is as much to be gathered from any number of establishing shots as there is in any moment of poignant character development. It is a work largely unconcerned with most the points of character and narrative convention, and correspondingly most pre-existing theories of narratology and film studies are of limited applicability, it is plainly a work that does not operate under the same framework that most films use. But, for those that can look past the basic expectations of genre convention, they will find a greatly rewarding and engaging work that manages to integrate narrative, cinematographic presentation and character writing in such a manner that each specific aspect of form, performance and perspective manages to inform and enhance the overarching whole, in a manner that allow it to occupy its own specific position. Unlike the aforementioned genre films, it is a work that cannot be copied or replicated, nor easily categorised into a Hiroki Azuma-esque database of elements that explain what makes it effective, and this is the precise reason that The Colours Within is effective, and worth seeing – it is a film that acts on its own terms, and manages to operate on a visual language that allows it to be incomparable to any other.