Philip Noyce’s 2014 film adaptation of Lois Lowry’s The Giver is a rush of color, beauty, and sound. It is both a depiction of pain and a celebration of life.

The Giver takes place in a society devoid of color, emotion, and inequality—conditions which are put in place in order to create maximum human comfort and efficiency for its people. There are no wars, no floods or food shortages, and there are perceived to be no deaths. But there is also no love, empathy, creativity or individuality.

Jonas, the main character, is assigned to be the community’s new Receiver of Memory, keeper of every piece of information and experience about the way the world was before. 

The viewer travels with Jonas to mountains covered in snow, to village dances and births and deaths and wars. 

We watch as he begins to see in color for the first time. The palette of the film slowly bursts from black and white into every shade of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet known to humankind—a visual representation of the fragments of our existence beginning to filter into Jonas’s consciousness. 

On one such occasion, Jonas is introduced to the concept of love by the Giver, the old Receiver of Memory who has been tasked with passing on his knowledge to Jonas. 

“Father, do you love me?” Jonas asks his father.

His father responds, “If you ask, ‘do you enjoy me?’, the answer is certainly yes. Or, ‘do mother and I take pride in your accomplishments?’ Well of course we do.”

The order created within The Giver’s world is precisely so precarious because it is founded on the idea of prohibiting love—that unpredictable, sacred, irrational force. Alas, human beings cannot really be controlled, and trying to force them to not feel things is like setting a tree on fire and still expecting it to be intact afterwards. 

When Jonas whispers in the dead of night to his adopted baby brother, “I love you,” it is the boldest sort of rebellion. He dares to feel, in a world where everything is designed so that he doesn’t have to. 

Through its subtraction of, and then return to, the world we live in today, The Giver emphasizes all that is right in front of us. 

It says: “Look at all of this beauty. Look at this love, look at this joy and color and these things that are able to grow from nothing. Are you truly willing to give all of this up just because you’re afraid of pain? Will you let the suffering and grief and agony in this life keep you from celebrating all that is good about this world? Or will you dare to change it, to build upon what is already here, and participate in the world as deeply as you can?”

We are living beings, and as such, we inherently feel. And to erase feeling is to erase everything that makes this life worth living.