Make Believe Bonus "Kimi No Iro" ("The Colors Within")

Or, How I Was Coaxed To Finally Check Out "K-On!"

Note: This post contains spoilers for Kimi No Iro (The Colors Within)

I’ve recently embraced the idea of going into movies with no info about them. I’m not talking spoilers — I mean like, barely watching trailers for films that seem to be getting praise. This probably has something to do with last year’s Kimitachi Wa Do Ikiru Ka?, Hayao Miyazaki’s alleged final film which had zero details shared prior to its release. That strategy both charmed me and lead me to loving the movie way more than I expected. Knowing zilch regarding it turned out to be a great move.

Once again, this approach paid off. I saw a trailer for Kimi No Iro (The Colors Within in English, though I’ll stick with the Japanese from here on out) before Inside Out 2 earlier this summer. That minute-long peek told me all I needed to know — high schoolers make a band. Sold! I spent the next month not looking into it, but thinking in the back of my mind “I should try to see that.” I hit “buy” on the Wald9 website after a stream of positive reviews on Twitter, topped off by music writer imdkm giving it “100 points.”

Strategy worked again, because I exited the theater at 10:00 p.m. delighted by what I’d just seen. Better still, Kimi No Iro surprised me with what might be the best set of songs written for a work about high schoolers making a band ever.

This was extra shocking given the trailer I saw originally, which is the same one at the top of this post. I’ll admit to subjectively disliking the music of Mr.Children, but I also objectively think “in the pocket” blows, all mid-tempo hopping towards no direction in particular. “They aren’t gonna make music like this in the movie, right?” Nope, and quite the opposite, really.

While the music element captured my interest, Kimi No Iro is really about navigating the bridge between adolescence and adulthood. Set in what it very clearly supposed to be Nagasaki but never acknowledged as such, the three main characters of the film find themselves dealing with major issues in hushed ways. Kimi quits high school, but can’t work up the nerve to tell her grandma. Rui loves music, but is expected to carry on his family’s island-based health clinic. Totsuko, meanwhile, has the ability to see a person’s “color” — Kimi is blue, Rui is green — but she can’t glance her own. While some of the character’s conflicts are a bit more metaphorical than the others, the central tension is figuring out who they are on the verge of change.

Critically, none of this is ever presented as urgent. The story plays out in just under a year, and despite the serious implications all of these decisions carry, none ever feel that world crushing. Director Naoko Yamada¹ told The Japan Times she wanted to emphasize “light, bright colors” in part to present the world of the film as “not frightening.” When this comes out in North America, I expect reviews of it to place Kimi No Iro in the category of “calm Japan” due to its laid back pace. Yet like other entries in this genre, there’s heavier thoughts lurking beneath the calm.

Music ends up being what brings the three together, and the medium through which they express themselves and eventually find their way forward. In many ways, Kimi No Iro is a stylistic and thematic opposite to one of the other anime I’ve seen this year, Girls Band Cry.² Whereas that series is urgent and positions rock ‘n’ roll as salvation, Yamada’s latest finds a trio of kids spending about 12 months crafting three songs, with their most ambitious move to share them with the wider world to upload them to what looks like SoundCloud.

There’s no big “let’s do this” scene at the end, but rather three friends savoring the time they had and moving forward. Maybe they’ll come back to it…or it was just a joyful memory to close out teenage life.

What truly surprised me, though, was the music in the movie itself. As much as I love them, shows like Bocchi The Rock! and Girls Band Cry lean very hard into “rock” sound and a very conservative view of what a band can be. Not so with Shironekodo, the group central to this movie. One of the first instruments we see Rui fiddling around with is a fucking theremin…and he incorporates it in their work! The trio’s gear runs from keyboards to guitars to synths to computers. There’s no physical drum, just percussion tracks.

The soundtrack, similarly, is all over the place and never restrictive to any one sound or style. The most left-field moment of Kimi No Iro — and the instance I became ride-or-die for this film — comes during a passage where Kimi sneaks into Totsuko’s school dorm for a sleepover. As the two enjoy their night together and eventually explore the premises, a familiar melody starts playing…Underworld’s “Born Slippy (Nuxx).” A hint of synth remains and the beat eventually picks up (and gets acid)…but this is primarily a hand bell arrangement of a electronic classic.

This all makes a little more sense knowing the music was handled by Kensuke Ushio, otherwise known as agraph who also serves as a touring member of Denki Groove, a member of the band LAMA and much more. He’s someone exploring multiple corners of music and seeing how they fit together, rather than sticking to a specific idea of what sound is…or even how a club classic should be. It bleeds over into the film. The three teens aren’t married to a specific idea of what music should be, or even what they should be using (analog, digital). They just want to create.

That leads to the climax of Kimi No Iro, a performance at Totsuko’s schools culture festival. Yamada presents an entire concert, and man these songs are killer³. Here’s where my lack of knowing anything came in clutch — the first song they play is this really chilly, downright steely number carrying industrial touches. It’s not far removed from something like “Destroy Everything You Touch,” and pulled out memories of particularly focused Japanese indie bands from like the early 2010s. The next song, “Aruku,” is a ballad, but it’s a very well done one AND it prominently features that dang theremin! It adds a genuinely haunting touch to it all.

Then there’s the closer, and the song that this week shot up to the number two spot on Spotify Japan’s Viral 50 List.

The opening guitar gives it away as being indebted to Sotaisei Riron, but the fiction high schoolers in this band then transform that into a groove funkier than the majority of that outfit’s song catalog. The lyrics thread together happenings from the film and hit on the central emotions of it all, but in a way that’s wrapped in metaphor (and in a move that would make Etsuko Yakushimaru proud, dropping in diary details to throw off the meaning, like what they ate yesterday). The drum beats get pretty wacky?! There’s all these little details within it that nail the excitement of being like 17 and just wanting to throw everything Garageband has into one track…but here it works. In the previous hour-plus, these characters didn’t know how to approach their thoughts. Here, they spill out in four exhilarating moments.

And then, as the credits roll…that Mr.Children song comes in, almost comically after a genuinely electrifying cinematic representation of teenage musical expression. Even at this point, I couldn’t feel deflated…it was a pleasant break, coming from the surprise before it.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies

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1. Whose directing debut was K-on! which I’m now deadset on finally seeing after enjoying this movie so much.

2. Also opposites stylistically — Girls Band Cry is entirely 3-D animated, while Kimi No Iro is all hand drawn, down to the performances at the end…something Yamada emphasizes she wanted to do in The Japan Times interview.

3. So killer in fact they distract from easily the goofiest moment of the movie…when a bunch of nuns start doing like silly dances? If the music was worse, this would have been like setting off a stink bomb in Sunday service, but I can forgive it given everything else happening.