Oh man, finally! You want to know how long I've been wanting to talk about A Silent Voice. Well the film came out in like last September in Japan so... It's been over a year now. I recommend watching it because A Silent Voice does something that I love anime for doing. It tells me a story that I don't see in other places. In this case it's a story that revolves around a young girl who is deaf. We don't usually see the deaf represented in anime, at least to this extinct. But this film isn't even really about being deaf, but more so a much greater problem that comes to light as a result of it. How this is all told, is why you should watch it. So ladies, Gentlemen and others my name is guineapig and Today the 2016 anime film directed by Naoko Yamada and produced by Kyoto Animation: A Silent Voice. Let's Jam.
The very rough synopsis for this film can be said in just a few sentences. Film follows around a young boy Ishida who as a child becomes the class bully to the new deaf girl named Shoko, eventually he goes a step too far in his bullying and becomes a target from the rest of his class. Flash forward to his teenage years and instead of the outgoing charismatic child that he was, he's now a quiet withdrawn introvert. He meets up again with Shoko and over the course of the film needs to come to accept what he did, and re-build a relationship with this girl who just wanted to be his friend. That's the film in a nutshell, but of course in this case I find the deeper meanings, and the kinds of things that the film implies, to be far more interesting. Take Ishida's bullying for example. For a good while his bullying was tolerated, his friends laughed and agreed with him, his teachers turned a blind eye to his actions, but as soon as he went one step too far the whole dynamic changed in an instant. Suddenly the same people who were laughing along with him are denying that they were even involved. "Why would I do something so horrible?"
It's a cultural response to the problem that's like an elastic band. When the elastic is loose that's when everything is 'normal', start stretching it and it's fine, it's still allowable this is the bullying. But take it just a tiny bit too far, society snaps back into place. and that hurts. Society likes things to be “normal†and anything it views as abnormal it likes to poke and prod into becoming normal. Unfortunately no matter how much you poke and prod a deaf person they will not suddenly gain the ability to hear. But children don't get that, they see the problem but don't know what they should do about it, and clearly they didn't get any guidance from the adults in school, possibly because the adults don't know what to do either. So Shouko was ostracized. Ishida's problem is that he crossed the line from being one among many, to the one who stands out. Its sounds stupid when I say it like that but welcome to society. Because he suddenly becomes abnormal in th amount and kind of bullying that he does, This makes the group snap back against him, and he doesn't know how to handle it. His world gets turned upside down and he becomes the withdrawn introvert that we see throughout the latter half of the film.
That's the beauty about this plot though, it's not about society. On the surface it's about this kid who now as almost an adult has to learn to take responsibility for his actions, he just doesn't know precisely how to do that. But really it is about society because it's society that's constantly telling him that what he's doing is wrong while at the same time doing the exact same thing. Just on a smaller scale. Which is what makes this film special. Like, older Ishida on his own is almost kind of a stereotypical protagonist, he's an archetype that we've seen before in drama shows like with Kosei in Your Lie in April or even Yuri from Yuri on Ice to a point, but it's his history as this little brat of a kid that ties him down. It brings about this idea of passive vs active bullying that makes the audience reconsider what makes a good or bad person. Let's take another character for example, Ueno, a girl from Ishida and Shouko's class who was one of the many who joined Ishida with the bullying of Shouko early on. Difference being that she was not affected by the same snap back that Ishida was, so she went on and grew up thinking that she never did anything wrong in the first place. Fast forward to when they all meet up later and her first instinct is to once again bully Shouko. Sure not in very obvious or malicious ways, she keeps to societal norms, but continues it when really you'd like to think she would have grown out of it.
Shoko's deafness ended up shining a spotlight on some of the aspects that they as children and even as young adults communicated with one another, but couldn't really address. They get faced with the problem of 'well this girl can't hear anything' and instead of listening in other ways and learning how to work around the problem they start to shift blame onto more tangible things, such as the actions of others without really understanding how they think. They aren't listening to their SILENT VOICE. The film's title can be attached to many different things. It's a description of the conscience, it's the desires of the characters. Its Shoko's entire being that she can't quite communicate properly with the rest of the cast, and by extension, the film doesn't always communicate with the audience. As an adaptation of a source material there are things that the film cannot explain or adapt properly and it just sort of fits in with how the show is being presented. There are several characters and minor events that occur or in some cases don't occur that lead to some confusing interactions, if you haven't read the source material, but largely they don't distract too much from the overall story.
Now people, myself included, will praise the visuals of this film. The visuals play a very important part in the story itself, they have more significance in this film about not being able to listen to others. There are a lot of flashbacks and moments that felt like they were edited in the vein of a music video. Courtesy of Naoko Yamada who worked on Kyoto-Ani's music focused series K-ON! and developed a knack for Music videos. Of course that's not to say that the visuals are the be all and end all, and the audio can go off and cry quietly in a corner or something. No, even the music is very concept driven, the concept of perceiving sound presented with the films odd approach to recording and mixing. Really though the thing about the visuals and the score and sound mixing in this film is that you get a lesser idea of it when someone like me is trying to explain it to you so honestly the best way to experience it is to just go watch the film and take it all in yourself. After which you can have someone explain some things in more depth. Now for a while before I actually watched this film I was worried about the constant comparisons that were made between it and and another film from the same year Your Name, comparisons made by people trying to determine which film was 'objectively' better. Having been a fan of the source material I worried that it wouldn't hold up, and while there are...some bumps in the road, perfection being difficult and all, this did end up being a far better adaptation of the original material then I expected. And really? Not to knock Your Name or anything because that on it's own is a fantastic film, I think I prefer this one. There are just particular ways that the story moves along that I enjoy, various things about its characters that I can relate to, and just the whole package was wonderfully enjoyable.