A Silent Voice9/5/2020 A Silent Voice was silent at the time of its release. An anime that debuted only after a month of Shinkai’s greatest Your Name. Whilst Shinkai’s latest was hitting one milestone after another, A Silent Voice was appositely muffled, even muted. It could have easily lingered in that shadow and faded into obscurity.
But, in the years that followed, it has manifested into something that truly deserves everyone’s attention, with a voice of its own and something desperately important to say. All you have to do is to learn to listen. Based on Yoshitoki Oima’s manga, A Silent Voice is the story is of a deaf girl named Shouko, who’s being bullied by a boy named Shouyo. The original work is phenomenal on its own, not only in its beautiful art-style and characters but also in its honest commitment to the authenticity of their personalities. Despite the world being more accessible than ever before, for people with disabilities, there is still a culture of shame. With A Silent Voice Oima prioritized reductionism, to surface the realism. Instead of capitalizing the disability for the dramatic and melancholic story unfolding in the foreground, it’s treated with utmost respect and care. Like many adaptations, A Silent Voice suffers ever so slightly with its slender runtime, compared to the more leisurely paced manga counterparts. But being a movie, the strings of its pacing are held by its Director Naoko Yamada, who has proven her adroitly time and time again. Be it with her feature-length side story Liz and the Blue Bird, or fun and lighthearted K-ON! series. But it was with A Silent Voice that Yamada staked her claim as a force to be reckoned with. As an anime adaption, A Silent Voice lost none of its beauty, its pain or its respect for the subject matter. It comes across just as earnest and nuanced as the source material. The main theme of A Silent Voice is Redemption. The opening theme shows Shouyo’s untainted childhood, it’s in the prologue where things take an ugly turn and we get to see Shouyo’s abusive relationship with Shouko. Next comes the foreshadowed future where we find Shouya a broken high schooler, on the verge of adulthood. Haunted by the guilt of his past and the social ramifications of being ousted by his classmates as a bull, he’s a lonely, depressed pariah who has erected his own walls to protect what little is left of his dignity. He can’t look people in the eye, for him they’ve ceased to exist, his surrounding is overpowered by the voice in his head, which by now is nothing more than noise to him. Much like the girl whose life he made hellish all those years ago, he’s deaf to those around him and lives in a world of silence. He actively seeks to minimize his own impact on the world seeking himself as harmful to others and is only looking to repay his debts before leaving his life behind. One of those debts is, of course, Shouko. Can one even makeup for their past deeds? Is it selfish to even try? These are the questions A Silent Voice concerns its viewers with. As Shouyo stumbles upon Shouko and discovers the person she was behind her disability, a disability that was nothing more than a nuisance to him in his carefree childhood. Shouko reveals herself to be just as broken and haunted by her past as Shouyo. But as they stumble upon the beginning of their newfound friendship, something that Shouko has sought her entire lifetime. They begin to heal one another. Ugly revelations and hurt feelings resurface time and time again, made better and worse by the reintroduction of old classmates and new characters, but as the film continues our leads find their footing not only as friends, but as individuals. To watch A Silent Voice is to buckle in for a rollercoaster, whose highs are wonderfully high and whose lows are absolutely devastating. It's an emotionally crippling film, one that will leave viewers full but fatigued. Whilst it can be brutally blunt with his cruelty, however, A Silent Voice truly sings when it's subtle. This little moment for instance is my favorite of the entire movie - a preemptively jealous glance of a school friend who's worried she's about to lose the affection of her classmate in favor of the new girl. This understated eye for detail is at its best however when it's turned towards the ostracization of Shouko. Throughout the film Shoko's sense of other is explored in brilliantly visual ways, whether that be struggling to keep up with her classmates, or appearing imprisoned by her disability, unable to truly ever connect. But, despite how often A Silent Voice seeks to hurt its viewers, it's done with the vitally important message of love and compassion. In a time and place where it's easier to ignore disability or hide it away altogether, A Silent Voice is a cinematic journey that seeks to shame such notions. Much like Shouya, we're urged to grow as a people, to make an effort for those who might be struggling, and ultimately to reach out to one another no matter what barriers life throws up. A Silent Voice is the story of a deaf girl and her childhood tormentors, and the evolution of such a dynamic as these players grow and mature. It's about the different ways we can react when faced with adversity or pain. It's about forgiveness and resentment. But, ultimately, A Silent Voice is about friendship and how such a curious human trait never moves in the way we expect it to. A Silent Voice speaks to the unexpected places friendship springs from, explores how it rarely ever moves in a straight line, and it understands that relationships can blossom in a mire of bitterness. That love and hatred are two sides of the same coin. For a film that occasionally stumbles over itself to get to its next heartbreaking story beat, and trades almost explicitly in youthful melodrama, it's a surprisingly adult tale of finding one another despite it all.
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