Adelaide Film Festival: The Colors Within

Title: The Colors Within

Rating: ★★★★½

Directed by: Naoko Yamada

Country: Japan

Classification: All ages

Link: https://www.adelaidefilmfestival.org/program/2024/the-colors-within

Kicking off Hub’s coverage of the Adelaide Film Festival, coming-of-age anime The Colors Within had its Australian premiere on Thursday night.

The film follows Totsuko, a girl with synesthesia in the form of seeing people as colours — though it’s never named as such in the movie — as she becomes fast friends with Kimi and Rui and the three come together in secret to form a band. All the while, the three struggle with the expectations of others; Rui doesn’t want to be a doctor like his family expects, Kimi hides the fact that she dropped out of school from her grandmother, and Totsuko tries to keep her synesthesia a secret.

The style of the animation was gorgeous, with a very free-flowing vibe thanks to the almost sketch-like line work and expressive faces of the characters. The background paintings were also amazingly well done, cultivating a bright and comforting environment everywhere from Totsuko’s dorm to the bookstore and the abandoned church. Specific attention was also paid to representing Totsuko’s synesthesia. Occasionally the audience would switch into her perspective and other characters would be overlaid with bright colours, sometimes removing the line work all together and just showing abstract blobs of colour dancing about the screen, a creative solution to showing a condition that takes place entirely within Totsuko’s mind.

The story was brilliantly engaging throughout almost the entire runtime. Despite moving at a slow pace, the film managed to avoid feeling like it dragged on, rather feeling more contemplative as it held onto small moments. The relationships between the characters were what kept the audience engaged instead of some high-stakes plot, and it was an amazing moment hearing the whole theatre gasp when Totsuko’s favourite teacher revealed the name of her own childhood band — on the surface, nothing to get excited about, but the investment that the characters had placed on this moment transferred directly to the audience.

 As much as we enjoyed The Colors Within, there were a few things that could be improved to bring our rating up to a full five stars. The emotional climax of the movie comes in the form of the band’s first live performance. Unfortunately, that is the one place where the movie does drag a bit. We see the performance in full; three full-length songs back to back with little to no action or dialogue happening in the meantime, and the same emotional peak could easily be reached if the first two songs were trimmed down a little.

Also, I would have loved to see some further exploration of the queer subtext of the film. Within the first five minutes we had both noticed what seemed to be Totsuko having a massive crush on Kimi — flustered interactions and Catholic guilt to boot — but it never developed any further. While there definitely could be some cultural differences regarding friendship that we’re missing, it most certainly felt a little gay to us.

The Colors Within is an amazing film with a cute style, heartwarming tone, and cool music, and is a film suitable for just about anyone to go and see for a chill afternoon (provided you’re okay with subtitles).

The Colors Within has another showing on Saturday the 2nd of November at 3:00pm at The Piccadilly. Buy your tickets at the Adelaide Film Festival website.