Directed by Naoko Yamada
Certificate U, 101 minutes
Released
31 January

This Japanese animated feature opens in a boarding school chapel, in which a teenage girl is praying the Serenity Prayer. In terms of real-life religious faith, this is not particularly odd; yet in terms of the movies, where any semblance of church or Christian religious life is often either excluded or painted in dark tones, it breaks the mould.

Nor does the film come, as so often in movies tackling church or faith, with the kick in the Christian teeth whereby the faith is shown to be foolish, or corrupt, or abuse-ridden, or despicable in any number of other ways. No, this just says, as part of life, worshipping God is okay. Catholicism is okay. Christianity is okay.

This girl has synaesthesia. Like the artist explored in British director Mark Cousins’ compelling, recent documentary A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, she experiences everything in terms of colours. After an art lesson, her paintings, pinned up with those of her classmates, stand out as completely different. She ponders, in interior monologue, the fact of her seeing differently from everyone else around her.

Totsuko, who can barely play an instrument, inadvertently forms an amateur rock band with Kimi who has left the school but hasn’t yet told her grandma and Rui who practices theremin and keyboards in an abandoned church in exchange for keeping it clean and tidy.

She writes a song about planets in their orbits, punctuated with ‘Amen’; one of the nuns who teach at the school tells her that a song about creation, beauty and truth, could be considered a prayer. And that this applies also, when the girl poignantly asks her, to songs about sadness or suffering.

The animated drama is punctuated by Christian liturgy (‘The Lord will keep you from harm’) in the context of life in a religious girls’ boarding school. However, there’s nothing pushy or confrontational about that: it’s simply presented as part and parcel of everyday life. As is the idea of kids playing in a band: as the kindly sister puts it to them, ‘the guitar riff was wonderful.’ This is a gentle and strangely affecting film about teenage angst, with an unexpected religious dimension.

Jeremy Clarke is a film critic. jeremycprocessing.com