The Colors Within (きみの色, Kimi no Iro, or Your Colors, or Kimi's Colors) is an anime film produced by Science Saru. It is directed by Naoko Yamada and written by Reiko Yoshida, both of whom have previously worked on A Silent Voice and Liz and the Blue Bird under the same roles alongside composer Kensuke Ushio.
It is focused on three young adults: Totsuko Higurashi, who is at an all-girls Catholic school and can see people as colors, Kimi Sakunaga, a girl who Totsuko admires and had just dropped out of said school, and Rui Kagehira, a boy with an interest in music. The three form a band together and as their bond grows, so do the personal challenges they face outside of their hobby.
It was released in Japan on August 30, 2024 following its premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival earlier that year. GKIDS licenced the film and released it in the U.S. on January 24, 2025, including an English dub by NYAV Post.
Tropes
- Affectionate Nickname: Totsuko’s roommates at the school give her shortened nicknames such as Tokko.
- Batman in My Basement: Totsuko does her best to hide Kimi in her room when the nuns find that Totsuko is still awake. Sister Hyoko notices something moving in the bed but decides to hide her suspicions.
- Calling Your Bathroom Breaks: Kimi hides in Totsuko room so her grandmother does not learn about her leaving school. Kimi and Totsuko are about to sleep when Kimi asks Totsuko to lead her to the bathroom. They are caught by a nun in the process.
- Christianity Is Catholic: Totsuko and Kimi study in a Catholic school run by nuns. Totsuko is shown to be a devoted Catholic as she prays and does the cross signal frequently and even she is willing to confess her sins after trying to hide Kimi in her room.
- Concert Climax: During the St. Valentine’s Festival near the end of the film, the main characters put on a show as their band and play three songs that reflect what they went through during the story.
- Double-Meaning Title: In Japanese, the title Kimi no Iro can have two meanings due to how the word "kimi" is written in hiragananote rather than the standard kanji note . The first one is the standard meaning "Your Colors", but the second one can be "Kimi's Colors", referring to the character Kimi, whose name is spelled in hiragana, and Totsuko's quest to recapture Kimi's colors in music, doubling as a Secondary Character Title.
- Family Business: Rui comes from a family of doctors who run a clinic, with his mother expecting him to follow in their footsteps.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Totsuko and Kimi, while the first feels attraction for Totsuko and the color she irradiates in her mind, we see only a friendship growing between them, while they share a bed, when Kimi is hiding to not reveal she left school, they don't really get intimate.
- Loophole Abuse: Sister Hyoko helps the band pull this off at the St. Valentine's Festival: Technically, they're only allowed to perform hymns, but she defines a hymn as anything that "celebrates the good, the true, and the beautiful," meaning that rock-and-roll is an acceptable genre so long as the songs fit that definition.
- One-Gender School: The Catholic school Totsuko goes to only allows girls, with boys apparently being a forbidden topic there. Though they're still lenient enough to let Rui play with his bandmates during the St. Valentine's Festival.
- The Reveal:
- After performing a ballet routine in the school garden to Kimi and Rui's cover of Giselle, Totsuko discovers her own personal color is red when she looks up at her hand in the air.
- The "God Almighty" carving in Totsuko's bed is heavily implied to have been made by Sister Hiyoko, when the latter confides to Totsuko that she used to be in a rock band of the same name when she was her age.
- School Idol: Kimi, at the start of the film, is a model student, member of the student council and leader of the school choir.
- Signature Instrument: While Rui developed talent with the keyboards, his preferred instrument is the theremin.
- Snowed-In: At one point as the group is staying in the abandoned church building they use to play their instruments, a heavy snow takes place, causing the ferry that was supposed to pick up Totsuko and Kimi to not make it and the trio staying longer than normal as a result. They use this opportunity to talk about their personal struggles that they are facing.
- The Stinger: Following the end credits, an internet file of one of the band’s songs plays while a few recorded videos of the group hanging out together are shown.
- Tastes Like Purple: From a young age, Totsuko has been able to perceive people as colors, with some of the more prominent examples being seeing Kimi as blue and Rui as green. Though she notably isn't able to perceive what her own color is. By the end of the film, she discovers that she's red.
- Two Girls and a Guy: The band/main trio of the film consists of Totsuko, the main character, Kimi, a girl who Totsuko admires greatly, and Rui, the one boy in the group.