Running Forward, Looking Back: animation director Naoko Yamada ponders her past and her future with two new music-infused films • Journal • A Letterboxd Magazine (2025)

The works of Naoko Yamada are filled with characters on the precipice of life-altering change. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that as 2022 draws to a close Yamada herself is in a moment of career transition: embracing a fresh start away from renowned anime studio Kyoto Animation where she built her career, for a return to her creative roots in experimental short film (Garden of Remembrance) and original anime feature projects (Kimi No Iro, coming in2023).

It didn’t take long for Yamada, a graduate of the Kyoto University of Art and Design who studied oil painting before moving into animation, to work her way up through the ranks at Kyoto Animation. Soon after starting as an in-between animator on the series Inuyasha came the chance to serve as key animator on some of the company’s most iconic shows, includingAir, Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star. Impressing in these roles, Yamada’s careful and subtle character animation made her a rising star, and she earned her first directing opportunities before the age of 30 on episodes of anime TV dramas Clannad and K-ON!, as well as taking on the music video-esque title sequences for the latter.

K-ON! The Movie is one of four films by Yamada to feature in Letterboxd’s list of the top 50 animated feature films directed by women, alongside A Silent Voice, Liz and the Blue Bird and Tamako Love Story—more entries than any other director. Three films also make it onto ourtop 250 narrative feature films directed by women, and two onto the 100 highest-rated animated features.

Kimi No Iro will tell the story of Totsuko, a high schooler who can see the hearts of people as colors. She meets a beautiful girl and a music-loving boy in a used bookstore, and the trio form a band. A brief teaser released work.

In keeping with her love of the power of music and the importance of soundscapes in her films, this past October, the director premiered Garden of Remembrance, a brand-new musical short film, at Scotland Loves Anime, where I caught up withher.

“Originally I was approached by [Science SARU co-founder] Eunyoung Choiand a producer from Avex and asked if I was interested in making a short film based around music, and since I love music, of course I was going to say yes,” Yamada explains of the short’s initial conception. “We started talking about which musician we’d like to work with, and because Avex is a music company I assumed they would want it to be one of their own artists, but they asked who I would like to work with. Anyone I’d like. I wanted to have a British-rock feel with a cool electric guitar and a strong female artist. It was then Lovely Summer-Chan came tomind.”

The melancholic pop-rock sound of the indie Japanese musician punctuates a defiant story of grief, accepting loss, and finding a way to remember what was lost rather than regret what could have been. As a woman paints a canvas of flowers, repeating a routine guided as much by the absence of those we have lost as the comfort of the everyday familiar, she begins to heal. The messages sent on her phone to her deceased companion and the painting of flowers are a way to express her one-sided love for a person now lost, culminating in an explosion of flowers, emoji andlove.

“The inspiration for the story was that the close friend of our main character, Boku, was no longer with us, and the place where his spirit is now is the garden of remembrance,” Yamada explains. “When the living think or remember him, the flowers rain down in that garden, and I thought it was a really nice idea that people’s memories would be turned into flowers likethat.”

“With the emoji, since he’s no longer here you can’t have a conversation with them, so we couldn’t have dialogue, but maybe electronic signals were a way that he could still communicate. I don’t think those [emoji] and texts are actually getting through to her, but I had this idea that he would still be sending these messages just as he had when he was alive, but fromheaven.”

Without dialogue, and punctuated by electronic guitar and crescendoed emotion and music, the result is a film with the visual stylistic flair of the music videos that have long influenced the creator—a style particularly prominent in Yamada’s work K-ON! and the opening sequence of A Silent Voice, which is punctuated by the punk of The Who’s ‘My Generation’.

“In this case we started from the question of what musician we want to work with, but usually it’s more about what kind of music a project needs, and we approach a musician based on that,” Yamada notes. “For example, with A Silent Voice I wanted music that, in this soundless world, reflected [the] inside of a person, with the sound of their heart, their blood moving, their muscles contracting, as though you were looking inside a microscope and using the electrical sound signals going through that body. This time, I was wanting something more emotional.”

In weaving music and animation into a beautiful tribute to the people we have lost, Garden of Remembrance feels like a deeply personal project for the director as she adjusts to her new responsibilities away from the studio she credits for assisting her growth as a creator. And having her name on the director’s chair from a young age has meant a gradual shift in Yamada’s production responsibilities over time. She’s an authority figure and a source of inspiration, which has meant taking a less active role in animation and trusting her team to fulfill hervision.

“The most important thing I learned at Kyoto Animation was teamwork,” Yamada says, when I asked what lessons she learned at the acclaimed studio. “There were auteurs at the studio, but the anime that I worked on always involved a lot of people working together, with everyone having the same ideas and moving towards the same goal supporting each other. That was the most important thing, and that still is something that I really value today in terms of being directly involved inanimation.

“I did initially try my best to continue animating even when I started directing, but I’ve gradually come to be able to trust my team more and found myself drawing less and less. I do still always make a point of doing the storyboards myself and keep in close communication with them, however, because that’s how I feel I can get my intentions across to everyone. [With Garden of Remembrance] we had a really good animation director and key animators and I would check their work or sometimes might ask if they could change a cut to capture the emotion correctly in a particular shot. So I don’t leave them entirely to their owndevices!”

It’s still a big shift, not only in studio or product, but in Yamada’s responsibility as a creator. It’s hard to shake this feeling when watching Garden of Remembrance in the context of her growth as a director over the past decade. Yamada’s films are about characters on the brink of a new chapter in their lives, romances soon to blossom like the flowers she evokes when words can’t convey emotions, with legs and arms isolated to capture the subtle twitches of emotion that can’t be hidden. Films like Tamako Love Story, Liz and the Blue Bird and A Silent Voice are masterful examples of portraying changing emotions and circumstances through hand-drawn images, notwords.

From the fresh-faced young animator she was at the turn of the century to now, there’s a responsibility Yamada feels not just to continue producing new anime, but to mentor the next generation of animators, all while learning from pastmistakes.

“I think about my responsibility to new animators a lot, actually,” Yamada admits. “To make one film, it takes at least two years, and some take a lot longer. So I wonder how many more I’ll be able to make. When I made A Silent Voice I thought I had my whole life in front of me, but now I’ve started to feel like my time is limited, and that makes me sad. Yet even in that sadness, I think that’s proof that I’ve grown up. As long as I can still draw, I want to keep making animation.”

“I think until now I’ve been so focused that I haven’t really looked back. Yet now when I look around, I can see people around me at the age that I was when I started out and, and they’re so fresh in this industry. And I’ve started to realize that until now I’ve been focused on running forward. Now, maybe I’m in a position where I need to start passing on what I’ve learned. At the same time, I do want to keep on running, and I don’t really want to lookback.”

‘Garden of Remembrance’ will be released in 2023. Visit the film’s official website for updates. ‘Kimi no Iro’ will be released in 2023, with a date yet to be announced.