Naoko Yamada on The Colors Within

With such successful, vivid dramas as A Silent Voice (2016) and Liz and the Blue Bird (2018), Naoko Yamada has become arguably the leading female director of anime in an industry still largely dominated by male voices. Her charming new film, The Colors Within (written by Reiko Yoshida), is Yamada's first feature that's not adapted from pre-existing material. "In terms of the story," the Japanese director tells me, "I came up with these three young characters who are naive, too kind, and who still live very much in their own internal world and haven't quite found the words to explain how they feel."

In the film, Catholic schoolgirl Totsuko is able to see the colours of people's emotions. Drawn to mysterious dropout girl Kimi, whose specific aura she finds overwhelmingly beautiful, Totsuko ends up befriending both her and music-loving boy Rui, leading to the trio forming a band to help convey what they struggle to put into words, writing and rehearsing songs in a closed-down church.

A lightly magical-realist riff on band-focused coming-of-age gems like Linda Linda Linda (2005) and We Are the Best! (2013), The Colors Within offers both material for queer-reading interpretations and, arguably, a sensitive portrait of neurodivergent experiences, though Yamada isn't keen to explicitly define Totsuko's abilities. "Totsuko senses something intangible outside of words," she says. "It's not muddied by things like meaning and logic. She trusts her senses and her unique individuality. If we try to put words to everything, something gets lost. I hope that people watching will find their own sixth sense and recognise that in Totsuko."

Joining Yamada for our conversation in London is Kensuke Ushio, Yamada's regular composer. Pieces of the original songs that the three teens eventually write and perform on stage are seeded throughout Ushio's score, something made possible by how early on in the production he was involved. "We already had the script but before [Naoko] had started on the storyboards, we'd already had this deep conversation," Ushio says. "She already had the lyrics for one song. As soon as she shared that with me, I came up with the song on the spot, which meant that it was actually quite easy to show the process of writing that in the film's score. What I was influenced by in my teenage years was British 80s new wave, and that was something I tried to bring out with the band's music."

Ushio's contributions didn't end with writing the band's bangers. The film's other soundscapes fuse with the musical score in places, thanks to extra work Ushio put in. "This film needed a sense of place," he tells me. "There's an old wooden church in the south of Japan and I went there to collect sounds, but also to do what we call impulse response, which allows me to electronically replicate the space using software. I collected the data that I needed to do that and then I've used that in various music scenes but also dialogue scenes."

"They both come down to light waves," Yamada says of the close relationship between the striking sound design and the colourful visuals. "To paraphrase something Totsuko says in the film, it's to do with the spectrum of light and that manifesting as colour in 2D and sound in 3D depending on the wavelength. I've tried to do that through the images and colour and Ushio-san has tried to do that through music, but it all goes back to the concept of light."

Thanks to how much thought and care has gone into its realisation, The Colors Within is among the great films about the act of creating music, making me wonder which portraits of musicians at work these two artists see as the best of that canon. Yamada's excited answer, delivered immediately, requires no translation from the interpreter present. "Oh, Amadeus!" she says. Ushio follows that with an amusingly guttural gasp of agreement. But there's also a more unexpected movie influence that looms over The Colors Within.

In one sequence, as Totsuko and Kimi take part in a secret sleepover on the grounds of the boarding school where Kimi is no longer enrolled, a lyric-free cover of a 90s song plays over their exploits – a hit track in its own right, but one made iconic by its appearance in a certain British classic. It's honestly best to experience this needle drop cold, but I just have to ask Yamada and Ushio about it. So, this is your warning that this interview closes by spoiling the song choice…

"As for Born Slippy," Ushio says. "I think you get it, don't you?" After everyone laughs, he clarifies: "For us, as a teenager doing the worst thing you can imagine doing, the soundtrack to that has to be Born Slippy."

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The Colors Within is released 31 Jan by Anime Ltd