“Colors, like features,” Pablo Picasso once said, “follow the changes of the emotions.” It’s a maxim that earns more validation than the Spanish artist could’ve ever dreamed in this vibrant, magical, endlessly affecting animated feature from Naoko Yamada, the Japanese animator and director behind such landmark films as Liz and the Blue Bird (2018) and A Silent Voice: The Movie (2016).
Young Totsuko possesses the ability to see and interpret what no one else can: the intrinsic, ethereal “colors” of others. As she seeks to balance this gift with her high school studies, transcendence-tinged band practice in an old remote island church, and her own coming of age, the previously esoteric question — what does it take to discover one’s true colors, and how to best help others discover theirs — transforms into tangible technicolor reality.