The Complicated Process of Color Design in Anime – An Interview with Nokotan’s Arisa Komatsu

When you think of anime production, you probably think of the directors, animators, and writers. But of course, there are many unsung heroes who have a vital part in getting your favorite anime made. Once such overlooked position is that of color design. But what exactly does this job entail? I sat down with Arisa Komatsu, the woman in charge of color design for My Deer Friend Nokotan recently at Wit Studio‘s office in Tokyo to find out.

Komatsu started her career not in anime but in games. “The company I worked for quite some time ago was a game company. I wanted to work in games but the company did a lot of things—and one of the things they did was making anime,” she began. “They didn’t have enough people who liked anime, so they asked me if I wanted to give it a try—and when I did, it turned out to be fun, and that’s [the start of] how I got to where I am today.”

“I started doing finishing work,” Komatsu told me, explaining the path to her current position. “About two or three years after that, I got a job as a color designer, which is what I’m doing now.” Since then, she’s done color design on quite a few major works. “The most famous thing I’ve worked on is Higurashi: When They Cry. […] I did the color design for Gou and Sotsu and it felt like a pretty big job. And then recently, I worked on a movie called Ōmuro-ke: Dear Sisters. I did the color design and I heard it’s getting good reviews, so I think it was a big one as well.”

But what exactly does a color designer do? “Color design is [the first part of] coloring the characters. It’s the job of the color designer to make the anime match up. First, you get a character, and then you start picking colors to match that character in the original work.” Komatsu continued, “Once the colors are decided, the colorists will have to paint the frames of the anime once they are complete. But that painting work can’t be done by one person—so a color specification chart is made so various different people can color the frames.”

The color chart is the key to making an anime look cohesive and uniform. “[On the chart] there are boxes, and for example, if you want skin, there are boxes labeled ‘skin,’ and you put all the skin colors there. You have to make that kind of chart for each character one by one,” she explained. “There are things to note that are unique to each character, like whether the eyebrows are see-through or not.”

Of course, there’s not just one set of colors for each character. The time or setting can change how the characters should look drastically. “For example, a character is outside during the day, but in the next scene, it may be dark at night. And when the scene changes from one to the other, there is a color chart that tells the colors to be used—and I give instructions such as ‘use this color from this cut to this cut.’”

Creating the color charts for each specific scene can easily turn into a multi-day process. “For example, the colors for nighttime are created and shown to the director for a color check, but in the meantime, several versions of the color pallet have to be created. Even at night, the colors can be a little bluish, dark, or something similar—and the situation often changes,” Komatsu told me. “If I’m having trouble, I’ll create a pallet on the first day, leave it for a while, and then look at it on the second day. So, I think it usually takes about two days.”

Luckily, it’s not like she has to start from zero for each scene. “The chart is quite… how should I put it, I already have one as a base, so to make it easier to convert when creating colors, I don’t create new colors but rather I create a filter. When you create a filter and want to change it, you can convert the whole chart in one go by placing the filter over the original, so it doesn’t take that long.”

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. “I get quite a few instructions for the key animations—or when there are close-ups, such as highlights.” She continued, “there are a lot of special scenes, so I often do the design myself.”

My Deer Friend Nokotan in specific had more than a few challenges in the color department that Komatsu had to overcome. “My Deer Friend Nokotan uses quite unusual or bright colors [for the characters], but the background is also quite bright—so it was quite difficult to make the bright colored characters stand out. If the background is too bold, the characters don’t stand out at all, so I had to think about what to do in that environment.”

Another issue came from the character design in the anime—namely the gradation of the characters’ hair colors. “In this work, My Deer Friend Nokotan, characters’ hair have two gradations. One at the top and one in the middle—and it’s very difficult to blend them and make them look nice.” She added, “And it’s also difficult to add additional color. […] The way you see things from a distance and when they’re moving can be very different just by adding color. It’s also different between updos and long hair, so there’s quite a bit of gradation! My Deer Friend Nokotan was difficult.”

Interestingly, a challenge she faces regularly involves whether Komatsu has seen an object in real life or not. “Overall, I think it’s difficult to create colors for things you’ve never seen before.” She then gave an example: “Higurashi: When They Cry is set in the past. It was difficult to create colors for things that only existed at that time, like old telephones, just by looking at [pictures alone]. There were many times when I would have made mistakes if I hadn’t looked carefully.” Going into more depth, she continued, “It’s the kind of thing where you pick up the boxy receiver and then spin the rotary to dial the number or something. But when you pick up the receiver, the inside of it is a different color. If you don’t look properly at such things—look at the little details—you often get the colors wrong. It is difficult to look at things properly in design work.”

Most often, Komatsu is a team of one. “If it’s a fairly large project, then yes, there’s a color planning assistant—and in those cases the work is divided up quite well between the many people involved—but in the case of My Deer Friend Nokotan, there were quite a few bright areas, so I felt like I could do it alone.” Luckily, it’s not her job to check to make sure her instructions are being followed. “There’s a person who checks the colors that have been applied called the ‘color specification inspector.’ That person checks everything.”

To sum everything up, she described her job in a single simple sentence. “It’s the job of the color designer to pick out the colors to be used and make the color specification charts.” If Komatsu’s job sounds like something you’d like to get into, she has some advice on how to do it. “The process to get into color design is that most people [start by] painting the colors—or they are in charge of a project and do the color inspection that I mentioned earlier. And when they do that, they often have to create colors themselves—so it’s pretty much the same in terms of content,” she explained. “After you gain experience with that sort of thing you then can get work doing color planning.”

My Deer Friend Nokotan is available on Crunchyroll, Prime Video and Amazon Freevee, Tubi, ADN, Anime Onegai, and many streaming services in over 140 countries and territories.