But she has been encouraged or permitted to be sombre to a point of solemnity.
Neither triumph nor disaster, the long-anticipated anime remake turns out to be a dark, moody sci-fi in a RoboCop-meets-Blade Runner vein – sombre to the point of glum, but visually stunning and commendably ambitious.
It is a scene of apocalyptic proportions: grotesque brick chimneys point their sombre fingers to the heavens, whilst all that remains of the majority of the wooden barracks are their ruined foundations.
It's a dangerous, dramatic story, told with sombre reticence from the point of view of an inarticulate character no more able to analyse the forces that manipulate him than the clever 16-year-old boy (in "The Pearl Fishers"), at an Irish Catholic school in the 60s, being "groomed" by the priests in ways he hardly understands.
By this point, the sombre mood of the music had a profound effect on the attitude of the band.
"I suppose so," she says, sounding more sombre than at any other point in our interview.
The sombre poet Y.-B Y.-B
The leading historian of modern India, Ramachandra Guha, chose to end his magisterial work, India After Gandhi, on a more sombre note: his countrymen, he pointed out, could be legitimately proud of their democracy but they had to remember that the task of lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty still lay ahead of them.
The brooding and sombre Skyfall scored a few points for post-modern playfulness via its introductory scene for the new Q, in which Ben Whishaw might as well have offered Bond a couple of Netflix vouchers and a year's subscription to Cosmopolitan for all the wow factor his proffered "gadgets" achieved.
The peers, who had been sombre and composed up to this point, collapsed into giggles.
