“You dont need a reason to like someone, but you need reasosn to hate someone”

Based on a popular manga comic, Japanese director Naoko Yamada’s (K-On) affecting drama examines the tempestuous relationship between a boy who hears and a girl who doesn’t.

After transferring into a new school, a deaf girl, Shouko Nishimiya, is bullied by the popular Shouya Ishida. As Shouya continues to bully Shouko, the class turns its back on him.

Shouko transfers and Shouya grows up as an outcast. Alone and depressed, the regretful Shouya finds Shouko to make amends. But is it already too late atone for his sins?

©2015 REKI KAWAHARA/PUBLISHED BY KADOKAWA CORPORATION ASCII MEDIA WORKS/AWIB Project

A Silent Voice doesn’t hold back on introducing its tough subject matter. It opens on the attempted suicide of its main character, Shoya Ishida, and we quickly learn the reasons behind it. As a child, he and his friends would bully a deaf student named Shoko Nishiyama. When the truth reached the school administration, the entire blame was placed on him and he became a social outcast.

The rest of A Silent Voice sees Ishida’s attempts to redeem himself. This includes trying to rebuild friendships and overcome his guilt of his actions by seeking out Nishiyama and befriending her. But as we quickly learn, redemption isn’t always as easy as Ishida would like it to be.

Based on the manga by Yoshitoki Oima, A Silent Voice was adapted from a screenplay by Reiko Yoshida and directed by Naoko Yamada. Both Yoshida and Yamada had previously worked together as key creatives on K-On! Yamada had also previously worked as an animator on Lucky Star and the TV adaptations of the Air and Clannad visual novels. Yoshida was also a scriptwriter on The Cat Returns and The Digimon Movie, as well as the co-creator of the Tokyo Mew Mew manga series. 

A Silent Voice is a movie that confronts a number of difficult topics. Childhood bullying, from both its causes and its effects, are a major theme. The taunting and abusive behaviour Ishida and his friends exhibit towards Nishiyama is shown in intense detail, and at no point is any of it justified. But at the same time, we see how the school system facilitates this behaviour, up until the point Nishiyama’s mother puts in a formal complaint.

Through Nishiyama we also get a sobering view of how it means to live with a disability. Her difficulty in communicating with her peers is an ever-present issue, from her struggles with speech to others absolutely refusing to learn sign language. It’s consistently handled with the utmost care, with her disability never shown to be shameful or wrong, just something she has to live with. It would be easy to create a character like this who is infantilised and pitied, but the movie goes out of its way to show her as simply a teenage girl with extra difficulties to overcome.

The movie also touches on themes of mental health and feelings of hopelessness and rejection. This is shown through both Ishida and Nishiyama, as Ishida is rejected by his peers due to social pressures while Nishiyama’s disability causes others to reject her out of fear or frustration. But the process of overcoming these feelings isn’t presented with an easy solution. It’s a painfully realistic depiction of these kinds of struggles.

ll of this is presented with some superb art direction. Conversations are framed awkwardly, as Ishida struggles to make eye contact with others. Feelings of isolation are represented by character faces covered by giant X’s. And small details in the background are amplified as characters struggle with introspection and loneliness.

And yet, despite how much A Silent Voice amplifies the difficulties in these characters’ lives, it remains sympathetic and hopeful. There are ways out of despair, even if they’re not easy, and the message it portrays is one that many could do with seeing.

Due to all of this, A Silent Voice has won a lot of critical acclaim. It has won awards from the Japan Academy Film Prize, Tokyo Anime Award Festival and Japan Media Arts Festival. The director of Your Name, Makoto Shinkai, even called it a “fantastic piece of work” that he felt he would be unable to replicate. And with high praise such as that, it is an essential movie to see as part of our festival.