Kids movies so often bear little of the actual lived-in experience of growing up, but Naoko Yamada's luminous anime "The Colors Within" gently reverberates with the doubts and yearnings of young life.

Totsuko (voiced by Suzukawa Sayu) is a student at an all-girls Catholic boarding school. In the movie's opening, she explains how she experiences colors differently. She feels colors more than sees them, like an aura she senses from another person. "When I see a pretty color, my heart quickens," she says.

Totsuko, an exuberant, uncensored soul, has the tendency to blurt things out before she quite intends to. She accidentally tells a nun that her color is beautiful. In the midst of a dodgeball game, she's transfixed by the purple and yellow blur of a volleyball hurtling toward her — so much so that she's happily dazed when it smacks her in the head.

Like Totsuko, "The Colors Within" (in theaters Friday) wears its heart on its sleeve. Painted with a light, watercolor-y brush, the movie is softly impressionistic. In one typically poetic touch, a slinky brush stroke shapes the contours of a hillside horizon. That evocative sensibility connects with the movie's spiritual underpinnings. Totsuko prays "to have the serenity to accept the things she can't change." In "The Colors Within," a trio of young loners bond over what makes them uniquely themselves, while finding the courage to change, together.

The ball that knocks down Totsuko is thrown by a classmate named Kimi (Akari Takaishi), who not long after that gym class drops out of school — hounded, we're told, by rumors of a boyfriend. (Boys are off-limits for the boarding school.) Totsuko, curious what's happened to Kimi, sets out to find her, and eventually does. At a local used... Read More