The Colours Within: a magical adventure into the world of a young girl with synaesthesia

This wonderfully dreamy, pastel-toned animation has a quietly galvanising power that benefits from big-screen viewing

4/5
Naoko Yamada’s animations always look so dreamily pristine, you wonder if the 39-year-old director sees the world a little differently to the rest of us. If so, that would make the heroine of her latest, screening at this year’s Tokyo Film Festival, something of a kindred spirit. She’s Totsuko (Sayu Suzukawa), a teenage convent school pupil who can ‘see’ people’s auras: bursts of pure colour that swish out of their bodies like vibrant watercolour streaks.
Synaesthesia, a rare brain-function quirk whereby senses blend with one another, is having something of a cinematic moment right now: it’s at the heart of Piece by Piece, the forthcoming Lego-built biopic of Pharrell Williams. But Yamada is careful not to diagnose Totsuko’s visions as a condition of any kind. Rather, they’re simply a part of the world as she meets it – less a neurological phenomenon than a spiritual one. 
They’ve clearly been a formative influence on this devout young soul whose head is rarely out of the clouds, not to mention something of a social impediment. When she tells her classmates she feels “sparkly all over” – shortly after having been hit in the face with a dodgeball during PE, thanks to an opponent’s especially striking sapphire glow – they can only shrug.
That rival turns out to be Kimi (Akari Takaishi), a talented guitarist who leaves the school shortly after the incident under mysterious circumstances. Still transfixed by her aura, Totsuko tracks her down to a bookshop, where during an exquisitely awkward conversation also involving another customer, a painfully shy synth fanatic called Rui (Taisei Kido), the trio decide to start a band. 
From there, the film follows their rehearsals in a picturesquely derelict church hall, intercut with the gentle rhythms of boarding school life. The storytelling is so snowflake-subtle, it often feels as if what plot there is might melt away. But the narrative spaces left by Yamada and her regular screenwriter Reiko Yoshida – especially around Totsuko’s faith and family background – only deepen the film’s pastel-toned magic. 
Thanks both to those strategic gaps and the gorgeous animation itself, which marries delicate line work with more impressionistic flourishes, many scenes have an emotional charge that tiptoes up on you undetected. I adored the sequence in which Totsuko sneaks Kimi back into school for an illicit sleepover, which in a flash of pure inspiration is soundtracked by a wispy cover version of Born Slippy from Trainspotting. (Elsewhere we get passages from Giselle played on a vintage Moog theremin.) 
Composer Kensuke Ushio’s score is as gauzily lo-fi as his work on Yamada’s 2016 breakthrough hit A Silent Voice, and in places has a certain synaesthesic quality: his piano lines allow you to feel the fuzz on the instrument’s hammers. Crucially, he also equips the trio’s band with three tremendous tunes, including one with the addictively bizarre refrain “Sweet kin, planets up orbiting, amen!”, which I can only hope makes as little sense in the original Japanese as it does in translation. 
In the UK, anime is still typically watched at home – but the climactic school concert where Totsuko and friends let their own colours loose has a quietly galvanising power that benefits enormously from big-screen viewing. It’s an intimate film with a roomy embrace.
Screening at the Tokyo Film Festival. UK release to follow