Naoko Yamada is carving an abstract path to the top of the anime world

Anime filmmaker Naoko Yamada thinks of herself as a cameraman. “I don’t think of it like anime is made by drawings,” she tells The A.V. Club. “But actual people and actual backgrounds.” Whether a genki girl learning guitar or a bullied deaf child contemplating suicide, Yamada’s characters resonate with young audiences around the world. From stylized moe figures to more realistic forms, her characters both look and feel real in animation—the way they move, trip, and bounce, the way they conceal their intentions and lie to themselves.

Seeing her characters as people is inseparable from her form. As a director and storyboarder, Naoko Yamada is also a cinematographer. Her animation often mimics the use of cameras, with sets shifting in and out of focus while light blurs as if shot through a lens. Her framing allows Yamada to take up creative space alongside her characters as she brings her own idiosyncrasies and fetishes—cameras, instruments, flowers—to the medium. Among the handful of animators to master kinesthetics, hers emphasizes the legs and feet.

Though her name is not yet as synonymous with anime as older masters like Hayao Miyazaki or Makoto Shinkai, Yamada has already influenced the industry more than most individuals (and the few women among them) ever have. But hers are not grand fantasies or apocalyptic events. Rather, she animates dreams, colorful imaginations, and school days. 

“It is harder for me to create anime-ish anime because I want to portray the existing world around us,” Yamada says.  

Yamada’s films leave the impression of seeing the world differently, though. Totsuko, the protagonist in her first original film, The Colors Within, is a quiet, synesthetic high school girl from a Catholic boarding school. She sees the people around her as unique colors, possessing auras. Her roommates are earthy tones, a teacher a warm yellow, a ballet dancer expressive purple. And then she sees a girl with the most beautiful color—a lapis blue. Totsuko lies about her intentions to get closer. 

Totsuko brings the girl, Kimi, and a boy (the color green) together to create a band in secret. She learns how to play piano, writes music about what she’s feeling towards her new friends, and begins to see their colors fuse. Without realizing it, they begin to bring out Totsuko’s own color, a color she’s never seen in herself. 

A film about a trio of quiet kids collaborating to create art for each other, The Colors Within resembles Yamada’s career. 

Naoko Yamada made her directorial debut in 2011 at Kyoto Animation with the studio’s adaptation of the yonkoma manga K-On! The series about the girls of a high school rock band club would erupt in popularity, defining the subgenre of cute-girls-doing-cute-things anime that grew during the 2000s. 

From the beginning, Yamada had Reiko Yoshida. The prolific screenwriter behind Studio Ghibli’s The Cat Returns and Mamoru Hosoda’s Digimon: The Movie, Yoshida would pen Yamada’s debut—and every series and feature Yamada has directed since. Asked about their relationship 15 years on, Yamada admits, “I really don’t know what she’s thinking.” Yamada characterizes the scribe, age 57, through juxtapositions. Yoshida’s writing is sharp, but filled with emotion—“not too much, though.” Her personality is calm and collected, but also passionate. “Even though she has this quiet demeanor…she has this deep universe just swirling around inside her,” Yamada says.

Together, the duo—along with the staff at Kyoto Animation—would spin K-On into two seasons and a feature film. They’d then go on to make a similarly cute anime about girls doing cute things together, Tamako Market, into a season of TV and a sequel feature film.

Following these successes, Yamada’s career would veer towards what she’s known for today. In A Silent Voice, Yamada would attempt to create something much less moe and much more cinematic. The film about a deaf girl and her childhood bully restoring their friendship viscerally and bluntly depicted the reality of ableism in Japan, with everyone from schoolchildren to teachers complicit in ostracizing a disabled child from her public life. One of her bullies would himself become the target of the class’ malevolence after the heroine left. At the film’s start, he attempts suicide and spends the whole film growing from the shame of his past self that has kept him isolated, befriending his former victim in the process. A Silent Voice was a box office and critical success, though coming up short in just about every measure to the record-setting performance of Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name., released the same year. 

More important than the reception, though, was the introduction of Yamada’s other recurring collaborator: Kensuke Ushio. A Silent Voice was a breakout success for the up-and-coming musician-turned-composer, showcasing what he could do with muted acoustic instruments and synths. A Silent Voice displays the synergy of the trio: director, writer, and composer. All that is said, shown, and heard utilizes negative spaces. Truths are revealed implicitly. Sounds must be felt, emotions must be seen, voices must find their shape.

What’s more, Yamada found a comrade in Ushio. “Although what we create is different, I think as artists our process and how we build things from the bottom up, the way we think in that process is very similar,” Yamada says of their collaboration. Peering inside that process, Ushio shared that the two work together from each film’s earliest conceptual work to answer the question of “What kind of a film will this be?” 

“We don’t really use words to discuss that, but use art pieces, poetry, photographs, mathematical formulas, and architecture to find what the core of this film is,” Ushio says.

Ushio’s scores emphasize the texture of sounds: one can hear the hammers of pianos shifting in the mixes and the metallic quality of vibraphones, while synths often fill in sonic space. Most recently, he worked to incorporate the theremin (performed by Grégoire Blanc) used by the character Rui in The Colors Within. 

“I take pains to bring sounds into the world that I created with Director Yamada,” Ushio says. “I just keep thinking and worrying about what to do, as if I’m wallowing in mud.”

After their first film together. Ushio would go on to score Science SARU’s marquee series, like Devilman Crybaby, while Yoshida would continue writing across the industry, most notably penning KyoAni’s adaptation of Violet Evergarden. Yamada would reunite them for 2018’s critical darling Liz And The Bluebird, another film that kindled an international reputation among animation and live-action cinema enthusiasts. The intense relationship between two high school girls performing a duet in their school’s concert band showcased Yamada’s and Yoshida’s ability to cherish girlhood with the craft often reserved for Miyazaki’s fleets or Shinkai’s fantastical disasters, while an allegorical fairy tale is told in parallel to the story through vibrant watercolors. 

Liz And The Bluebird would also be Yamada’s final production at Kyoto Animation. Yamada says her desire to leave the studio was about challenging herself as a director to create something she could not yet imagine. The move also followed a 2019 arson attack at the studio which killed 36 people.

“I wanted to challenge myself with that unknown, unimaginable something,” Yamada says. That something would become The Heike Story, a prestige miniseries adapting novelist Hideo Furukawa’s translation of the Heike Monogatari. Produced at Masaaki Yuasa and Eunyoung Choi’s Science SARU, known for its international team of animators producing critically acclaimed works tailored towards older audiences, Yamada reunited with Yoshida and Ushio, cementing their partnership. The Colors Within is the trio’s fourth production. 

Yamada, Yoshida, and Ushio’s quiet creations contrast with the greats of the anime canon: muted colors, thinner outlines, sparse instrumentation, minimalist soundscapes, white space, silence. It’s easy to associate these qualities with femininity. While Yamada’s roots are in moe like K-On, Yoshida has written many cute-girl-doing-cute-things anime like Girls Und Panzer. (Ushio’s discography, though, veers into rock, and one must imagine him turning the slides way down on all his synths for Yamada). With respect to Eunyoung Choi and Atsuko Ishizuka, Naoko Yamada is the highest-profile woman in the anime industry today and perhaps the most well-known female director in its history. 

“I do get a lot more interest because I am a female director,” she says. “I guess that’s fortunate. But on the other hand, I don’t want people to consider my gender to consider my work. I’m hoping that this gender gap will continue to [get] smaller in the industry.” 

Beyond her use of sensory abstraction, Yamada’s biggest differences from both older and contemporary masters does appear in how gender is a part of her projects. “What’s most important to me in all of my work is to always have respect for my characters,” she emphasizes. “I think that’s really connected to always having respect for my viewers…That is something that I always want to hold true to myself.” There is a stark difference between Yamada’s image of her characters as people worthy of respect and Miyazaki and Hideaki Anno talking about a 16-year-old Nausicaä’s breasts. 

Yamada’s films are about girls in a way that Miyazaki’s, many of which feature female protagonists, never were, but her films want to address connection more than gender. Boys are often (but not always) a part of that dynamic. Her filmography depicts the embarrassment as much as the accomplishments of adolescence, her characters unable to live in their prescribed love stories. Not just yet. The Colors Within ends with a mere suggestion in its final seconds.

As Yamada and Yoshida’s narratives have always embraced ambiguity at their ends, this prompts questions of intentions and desires. What does Yamada want from her films? “I wanted to create a movie that you don’t understand, but you experience or you feel,” Yamada says. In this pursuit, Totsuko’s synesthesia plays to Yamada’s strengths: Her career has been based around seeing animation as a medium for music, time, movement, lighting, and colors to express deep feelings.