It's heartening to see new companies making waves in the anime industry, especially filling a niche that feels distinctly theirs. Studio Trigger is one of the most famous modern examples, along with the more recent rise of MAPPA since Yamamoto Sayo began to take a more active roll, but one name that's lesser but still somewhat known in anime circles is Studio Colorido, which was founded within the last five years. Their niche is clear from almost all their works: if Trigger's colorful style is flashy and based on action animation, then Colorido's colorful style is a more calm and commonplace one, stressing the vibrancy of life and childhood imagination let loose. Their most famous work is certainly on McDonalds' commercial Mirai no Watashi which made the rounds online last year, but perhaps the next most recognizable image is of a little girl in a plain red dress riding a simple wooden chair into the screen at the end of the Noitamina block intro. This image, taken from the short Paulette's Chair commemorating the block's 10th anniversary on the air, is a brief but endearing image of freedom and imagination designed by Tete, the pseudonym for director Ishida Hiroyasu, who is one of the cornerstones of Colorido's work.
The image of Paulette riding the chair reminded me of another of Ishida's works, Fumiko's Confession, an equally wild and unhinged ride focused on a girl freaking out after being rejected by a kid in her class. The first time I watched Fumiko's Confession I didn't enjoy it quite as much, having just watched a breathtaking and very quiet work called rain town and not feeling the mood for wild and crazy. But Youtube recommended it after rain town so I watched, and later going back I appreciated the animation that went into animating Fumiko running down a giant flight of stairs after her rejection, screaming and barely maintaining her balance. Why did Youtube recommend me Ishida's debut, clearly a gem of animation, after its complete tonal opposite? Well, it turns out Ishida did rain town as well, as his graduation project from Kyoto Seika University before going right to work with his mentor Sugii Gisaburou on The Life of Guskou Budori, and thereafter going to Studio Colorido.
rain town really couldn't be more unlike Ishida's typical wild style in Fumiko's Confession and Paulette's Chair. Without any dialogue, it shows a child meeting a robot in a rainy town completely awash with blue, and with two assertive but soft piano tracks by Komatsu Masafumi accompanying the rain and their walk through it. It feels a lot like Disney's style of exposition, particularly the montage of Paperman and the silent character exposition of Up's opening sequence. While it's uncommon in Japanese animation I would hesitate to call it “experimental”, as it does fit in with an established mode of storytelling, but as a graduation work it's beautiful, and I hold it as a rare gem of animation around the world.
Eventually he began his work at Colorido, after Fumiko's Confession receiving the Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival turned plenty of industry heads. Of the nine separate works Colorido has been in charge of to date, Ishida directed three including Paulette's Chair, and did work on two others. When considering that three of the remaining four works are commercials, it's clear that Ishida's roll at Colorido is key, and his style defining of the studio. Compare for example the commercials Colorido did for Marukome, McDonalds, and Puzzles & Dragons to Fastening Days,Ishida's commercial for the YKK company's zippers. Admittedly Ishida got 10 minutes where the others got 30 seconds, but his way of advertising zippers, with superhero kids using them to zip around from building to building and literally patch up the city, is both visually Ishida's bright-palate rounded style in force and emblematic of Colorido's cheerful free-flowing worlds.
Another thing that's clear about Ishida is that he works best without needing to work around a plot. rain town worked through its mood, visual style, and aimless wandering, while Fumiko's Confession and Paulette's Chair are both based around a girl being railroaded along a short journey that conveys life and energy to the viewer. The visual aspects of Fastening Days and the crazy conceit of using zippers in a superhero work save it from being bogged down by actual plot, which is simplistic but also not well flushed-out. And his longer Rain in the Sunshine, to me very reminiscent of the internet hit Cencoroll, is overly wrapped up in a love story that has nothing much to convey, unlike the brief fantastical moments where Ishida seems to just let himself go.
It's hard to evaluate Studio Colorido as a whole, with barely an hour's worth of animation to their name, but that much is definitely enough to evaluate Ishida himself. If the studio continues to gain traction in the industry, I hope that they'll be handling those wild scenes of everyday life that seems to fit them so well, whereas I'm a bit more skeptical of what they would do given longer runtimes to develop a larger story. So far their only success in the latter category has been Shashinkan, which wasn't Ishida's work and feels very different from the rest of the studio's oeuvre. But Ishida continues to upload most of his work online, so I hold out hope that he's embracing what he does best, and if I had to guess what he enjoys the most.