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 in 2023).

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, including Air, 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.

A turning point came when she was offered the chance to direct the feature film conclusion of the K-ON! franchise, putting her in sole charge of a project for the first time at just 27 years old. The movie was a journey not too dissimilar to Yamada’s own, as the music club at the center of the series traveled to London for one last trip on the cusp of graduation.

K-ON! The Movie balances a light-hearted road trip with the difficulties of saying goodbye. As three of the light music club plan to graduate, the fourth member will be left behind, and the subtlety in which Yamada’s film understands this sadness combined with the hope of fresh starts and a reminder of the strength of these relationships is something which makes the film a beloved work of animation even beyond fans of the original TV series.

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 our top 250 narrative feature films directed by women, and two onto the 100 highest-rated animated features.

It’s an impressive slate of achievements for a filmmaker to hold at the age of 38, elevating Yamada’s profile to one of the most beloved directors in animation today. And she’s still moving: after spending her entire career at Kyoto Animation, Yamada left in 2020 to become a director with the Masaaki Yuasa-founded studio Science SARU, in order to work on new projects that offered her opportunities that weren’t possible at the close-knit Kyoto studio.

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 with her.

“Originally I was approached by [Science SARU co-founder] Eunyoung Choi and 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 to mind.”

The melancholic pop-rock sound of the indie Japanese musician punctuates a defiant story of grief, accepting loss, and finding a way to 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 and love.

“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 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 like that.”

“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 from heaven.”

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.”

Within animation, however, there is one film whose surrealist stop-motion puppeteering, despite its vast tonal departure from her own work, is specifically credited as attracting Yamada to the medium of animation. “I always say the same film, and I feel like I want to update my answer! But the film I saw that made me want to be involved in film and in animation was Czech director Jan Švankmajer’s Alice. That way of expressing his imagination was what drew me towards the direction I ended up going in.”

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 her vision.

“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 ing each other. That was the most important thing, and that still is something that I really value today in of being directly involved in animation.

“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 own devices!”

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, not words.

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 past mistakes.

Moving forwards while ing the past. Despite what we’ve already seen from Yamada, it’s hard not to feel that her best work is yet to come. What could be more exciting than that?