Childhood friends share evening by a river.
Reminiscing about times and people gone by, with an eye towards the future.
A gentle smile,
an awkward stumble,
a confession of love.
What stands out about this scene? Doesn't it feel like the temperature has gone up a bit?
Even my heart starts to race as we build to this clumsy, yet sweet expression of adolescent romance.
Now watch it with no sound. Pay attention to the sunset.
You can still feel it, can't you?
Color tells the story.
To best understand the power of color in Tamako Love Story, we need to establish what makes it such an important tool,
and to do that we'll have to dip our toes into "color theory",
at least as much required to establish proper context for a 15 minute video on an 80 minute film.
But before we go any further, have you watched Tamako Love Story?
What about its TV series, Tamako Market?
You can do both over at HIDIVE, subbed and dubbed.
HIDIVE has a huge backlog of shows, including a number of my favourite anime love stories:
from "Bloom Into You" to "Ore Monogatari!!"
Sign up now at hidive.com for a free 30-day trial, where you can catch all these anime across your devices for free,
and see for yourself the colorful world of Tamako Love Story.
Color theory is a field of research dedicated to understanding how humans perceive color,
the psychological and physical reactions we have to it and the aesthetic rules that come from it.
All that is to say: "colors mean things".
Of course, the visual perception of color isn't the same as reading words on a page.
A slight tweak in saturation can completely change the feeling it gives off.
The same hue can instill opposing impressions in two people.
Like any verbal language, the vocabulary of color is not necessarily universal. Cultural differences may affect interpretation.
Color theory is not as simple as x=y.
It's both the science of this crossover between human optical perception and psychology,
and the art of communicating a feeling through it.
When applied in a design sense, it isn't always concerned with these emotional connections.
Here, aesthetic sensibilities can be paramount, crafting a desired visual personality through temperature, saturation and hue.
Again it toes that line between the objective versus the subjective,
but generally speaking, a designer leverages these aspects to imbue perceptions of visual attractiveness.
Media then, offers an interesting intersection of the aesthetic and emotive use of color.
Color communicates something about a work. It can represent a character, a feeling or an idea.
Much like any other visual component, from lightning to shot composition, color is another storytelling tool at a creator's disposal.
Of course it's far more than symbolism or thematic expression too.
Color is a driving force of the work's visual identity. It sets the tone of a scene.
How does a shot with cooler temperatures make you feel versus warmer ones?
A livelier, energetic film will draw from a different palette than a moody picture.
All of this is readily apparent, whether you consciously think about it while you engage with a film or not.
It's often the key ingredient in what separates a bland aesthetic, from one that really pops.
Much like any great designer, a smart director knows how to use each aspect of visual perception to most effectively communicate their story.
In a visual medium, the questions of what color to use and where, are critical.
In anime production, these decisions often come down to the color designer, working in tandem with the director.
It's their responsability to set the palette for a work,
first on a macro scale (the general color scheme they'll pull from),
but also the individual colors for specific elements
This will vary across productions depending on a color designer's role,
but could include anything from props and clothing to buildings and environments.
This doesn't mean they color the elements themselves,
the designer tipically provides reference sheets with the desired range of tones to the painting department, responsible for coloring the element.
Of course, given the monumental amount of features in any anime, this would be a lot for one person to manage,
so productions will often rely on further staff (tipically referred to as color coordinators), to take on particular parts of the work,
working with the designer's approval in their tonal choices, to create the color sheets for their episode or act in a film.
You may also see this called "color setting".
The color designer and coordinators will also tipically look over the finished product of these elements,
for consistency and ensuring they fit the desired aesthetic.
Here's Tamako Love Story's color designer, Akiyo Takeda,
in their own words describing their role on Hibike! Euphonium's production:
"I chose the colors of anything that was drawn in animation: the characters, props and instruments.
I worked to create the different colors that would be a result of time passing by, twilight or night.
Supervised each episode's color coordinator's props, and changing colors to ensure that they matched within the work.
It's an important job to make the world view together with the background art."
Despite filling a vital role to an anime's ultimate product,
I've noticed a distinct lack of coverage on color designers specifically.
Personally speaking, whenever I filter through a new slate of anime,
the number one thing that will immediately make a seasonal separate itself from the pack to me,
is an effective use of color.
Few studios do so as well as Kyoto Animation.
Even as they take on different art styles, KyoAni works share such a distinct visual identity.
No aspect is wasted.
Lighting, photography, camera work...
They offer a unique blend of animation and live action principles, to create an appealing aesthetic.
Even if you prefer a more abstract style, like the works of Shaft,
or one less focused on realism like a Mob Psycho 100,
the one thing you can't in good faith call KyoAni's visual style, is "generic".
Nowhere is that more apparent than how their colors consistently jump off the page.
Back to Tamako Love Story, let's look at how the film, led by Takeda and director Naoko Yamada,
follows through on these principles of color theory.
Immediately, Tamako Love Story stands out from its parent TV series.
Where Tamako Market is a lighthearted slice of life, focused on the community between its characters,
the follow-up film takes a slightly different direction:
focused more on the feelings of its titular characters, in telling a traditional teen romance story.
The director wanted the film to have a more realistic vibe, as it thursts Tamako into an entirely new scenario for her.
To do so, she mixed up its visual style,
both via camera work, using shots indicative of a telephoto lens to give the impression that these moments were being filmed from a distance
(Yamada moreso than any other director at the studio loves to draw on live action techniques), as well as its color.
The effect is a more filmic quality that helps establish this sense of authenticity.
Yamada said she stayed constantly vigilant that this project was a movie when constructing its visuals.
Above all else, she wanted the feelings of the characters to seem real:
"The first has to be direction of how the atmosphere should feel.
I considered how to balance and match anime-ish materials, and live action materials,
in order to have the viewers feel like the cast were living, breathing people.
If I wanted to be anime-ish, then I would use a lot of distortion and anime-ish expressions.
The coloring and backgrounds, among other things, were also changed little by little from Market.
I thought about the impression everything would give on the final video,
but I would be happy if people would think "it really felt like Tamako was living""
Market is filled with vibrant color.
The shopping district bursts with these bright pastels indicative of its warm, inviting atmosphere and the cheery nature of the series.
Love Story shares this vivid palette, however turns the saturation up, increasing the intensity of each hue.
Compare any shot of the Market side by side, and the difference between the two is stark.
You can see it in the characters aswell.
Tamako's hair appears more formless and natural here, as its black color is deeper.
The effect is a much richer aesthetic that works in service of the heavier emotions and life decisions facing the cast,
compared to the fluffier vibe of the TV series.
Throughout staff interviews, one word Yamada kept coming back to was "humid",
in describing the film's atmosphere: the sweet aroma of adolescence.
The change in saturation is an extension of this.
The temperature played a role as well. Yamada said:
"Bright colors are something that Market and Love Story have in common.
I worked to make those bright colors create a good feeling,
but in Love Story, it was also important for me to add calming, cool colors aswell."
It creates a different environment to what we saw in Market. Less energetic.
See this scene from the film's first act.
On the girls' walk home as they discuss the future, the scene is bathed in analogous purples, from the sky to the water below.
There's a growing uncertainty in Tamako throughout the scene, as her friends seem much more confident about their next steps.
The temperature in these moments slows the film down to focus on the character's headspace.
"When we put those feelings into the colors and layout, it feels like it unconsciously affects those working on this movie.
I wanted to attach a lot of colors to emotions."
Characters are frequently framed against the open sky.
Adolescence forms the film's guiding thread:
that moment of youth where a new world stretches out before you, and the difficulty of determining how and where you want to proceed.
When that uncertainty takes hold of them, they're often set in front of the sky, but separated from it, or cast in shadow.
The bright blue immediately draws you in, but the characters don't know how to enter it
In the film's first act, before Mochizou's confession, night scenes between him and Tamako are bathed in a monochromatic blue.
It's a vibrant look befitting a fairy tale teen love story, that sets the film's aesthetic
but they paint a much different picture after the confession, when Tamako's at her most unclear.
She runs from Mochizou at the bathhouse, too flustered to confront him,
and finds herself looking out at space stretched before her.
It's a direct call to Yamada's theme of Tamako standing at the entrance of the universe, the fisheye lens drawing her out in front of it.
Notably, the color is much dimmer, not like the bright blue night sky from earlier.
Here, it's almost threatening, as Tamako doesn't know what step to take into it.
Yamada said: "The embarrassment, darkness, and light of adolescence is very important. I kept that in mind as we made the visuals.
It wasn't just the layouts or the character positioning, but the coloring was also very important to display that motif.
I thought about various ways to make the audience be absorbed in that sensation, while discussing things like the lens focus
and the atmosphere with the characters, alongside the background staff, color coordinators and photographers."
At every level, Tamako Love Story is Naoko Yamada's film.
Beyond storyboarding the entire work herself, Yamada even took on the role of color checks for each and every element,
recognizing its importance to the vision she wanted to create.
"I concentrated on the tone of the video. For example, in evening scenes my utmost attention goes to things
like how evening colors can help cure a person's heart.
I'm still in the middle of researching, but I strive to do things like not use colors that are soothing
when the final video image is meant to feel uneasy when you view it.
I devote everything to making the work feel good enough that you want to see it. There's a lot of parts that I'll entrust to
the unit directors like the drama and such, but I won't hand over the color checks to anyone else."
Color is always a fascinating component in Yamada's works.
Even at her first film, K!ON The Movie, Yamada made sharp use of the new medium compared to the TV series.
Together with Takeda as designer,
she mentions lowering the overall shade of the colors, playing with the color of sunlight, and other minor alterations to give it a more refined look.
These small details can radically alter the impression of a work, while rounding out its aesthetic in subtle, but distinctly felt ways.
A Silent Voice, Yamada's next film after Love Story, is filled with these instances.
Color coordinator Kana Miyata says they added unique accents to the base color of certain elements to distinguish them.
Tears and sweat for instance. Two variations of water that receive cooler colors, however, they added slight pinks to tears
and a green tint to a character's sweat.
They frequently made adjustments on a cut-by-cut basis.
"In our previous productions, we would decide on the general tendency of the palette during meetings, and then continue to work as normal.
In this case though, we would also check the composited image with the background for each cut, and add more minute adjustments."
Yamada's guidance for the color and effects teams on A Silent Voice circled around natural expression.
The film is filled with earthy, lighter tones as a result then. A sharp contrast to Tamako Love Story's heavily saturated hues.
One request she had was to not make the shadows pitch black, so the team added a bit of light into them.
"If they're nothing but a loss of brightness, you end up with a darker film. So rather than simply doing that, we mixed in some new colors
like a nice light blue, all for the sake of making them have more of a presence."
Miyata described a new technique color designer Naomi Ishida came up with, to better present the feel of the hair:
"Two types of effects were used: for dark haired characters, we had highlights were light would reflect off the hair;
for characters with brighter hair like Shouko and Kawai on the other hand, we touched it up to deepen the lines
and achieve a livelier feeling."
You can see a similar technique used in Violet Evergarden, not only with the characters' hair, but all elements in focus.
Led by color designer Yuka Yoneda, they colored lines and shading based on the environment, in order to integrate objects into the space.
If a character stood near water for instance, you'll see streaks of blue in the shading of their hair or the folds of their clothing.
Indoors you might notice more browns reflected here.
Liz and the Blue Bird, another Naomi Ishida work, makes enormous use of cool colors that set its sober, airy mood.
The scenes inside the fairy tale world of the Liz story meanwhile, burst with vibrant color in contrast.
When the school scenes do turn away from this cooler temperature, it's often to set a different tone.
The unnerving greens when the distance between Mizore and Nozomi is most felt, or the reds in their ultimate confrontation, when
they lay their feelings bare.
The hues in Liz paint a completely different image of Kitauji High School, than what we see in its parent series Hibike! Euphonium,
an Akiyo Takeda work that tells its own story through vivid color, with some of the more eye-popping scenes KyoAni has ever produced.
Perhaps my favourite example of color from all KyoAni's catalog, comes out of Ishida's work on Hyouka.
No series better illustrates the artistry KyoAni can pull out of the most ordinary of places than Hyouka.
Even in the setting of a mundane high school, the lighting and coloration consistently keeps it alluring.
While the bulk of the series relies on yellows and browns mixed with slight tints of green, the climax in the final episode
opens up to a stunning pink, the sunset and falling sakura petals creating a truly breathtaking scene, as eternal optimist Chitanda
finally opens the cynical Oreki's eyes to the beauty all around him.
It's a scene that captures what KyoAni is all about. Led by someone integral to establishing that ethos in the first place
Color is really a perfect indicator of the strenght of a production.
These aren't the choices and drawings of any one individual, anime is a collaborative effort. There are so many disparate
branches of the project that all have to come together to produce a cohesive final art form.
Color represents that cohesion. It has to all work as one, from the characters and props, to the background art.
However, when these elements have to be outsourced, or rushed due to scheduling constraints, it can introduce discord into the visuals.
But while color can be a symptom of a production's problem, it can also be a sign of its health.
Let's return to Mochizou's confession scene. Follow how the timing of the sunset matches the progression of emotion.
The sequence begins as normal: sky blues and light yellows of the evening reflecting off the water,
a separation shot with the stones through the river forming a line between them, accentuates the mental barrier Mochizou feels,
trying to psych himself up for this.
As he moves across the stepping stones, the blue has dissipated, replaced by the yellow hue growing deeper.
When Tamako moves to join him, the red starts creeping in.
A wide shot of the two further establishes the shifting temperature of the scene.
With each cut, that red pink from the sunset grows stronger.
Again, it comes back to that wide shot, and now you can clearly see the shift.
After Tamako drops the mochi rock into the water when she nearly falls, letting go of her own world as she's pulled into a new one,
the ensuing cut of Mochizou holding her arm covers the scene in a monochromatic red hue, the characters are practically glowing with it.
Finally, it culminates in Mochizou's confession, leaving Tamako as red as the scene around her, before she stumbles into the river.
She runs off embarassed, her thoughts racing, as the world starts to melt behind her. The pink environment dissolves into
a series of blurs and lights as she makes her way back to the Market.
There, the district becomes this shapeless collection of watercolors and paint blobs,
in what Yamada calls a major event for Tamako, as it opens her to a world she hasn't experienced before,
and thus the world she's familiar with loses its form, reduced to nothing more than its many, bright colors.
Yamada described the moment for Tamako like so:
"A 17 years old girl taking her steps forward in life would surely think that love is a good thing.
However, I was extremely particular about how to depict a girl that was close to falling in love.
Though love itself is an extremely charming topic, it's something that slowly, bit by bit, begins to butt in people in real life,
as they don't sense it coming. It was quite troublesome to dig that out.
It's like trying to make a light pink color when mixing paints:
add a little too much or not enough of this color, and it's immensely wrong, kinda like that.
A love story is an immensely difficult challenge."
It's not just the color that brings it all together. The ways the film uses lighting and camera work,
each tell their part of the story as well, that's just it.
Every aspect of the film contributes to the story being told.
Everything in animation is a choice, it's built from nothing.
From storyboard to keyframes, backgrounds to painting, lighting to effects.
A smart director and staff know how to use each aspect to its full advantage.
When they flow together, they each tell their own story, and become an invaluable part of the whole.
A showcase of art, all made possible with a splash of red.