A Silent Voice - Movie Review

A Silent Voice is a new anime film that's currently in the middle of a limited release. It's shown at a few theaters here in Cleveland and is now starting to spread out amongst the nation. This film follows a young boy in sixth grade who gets a new classmate. A young girl who's deaf, who's very excited to communicate with her classmates by bringing in a notebook that they can leave notes in and she can get to know the students better. And eventually she becomes a target for this boy and he bullies her every chance that he gets. He makes fun of the way she reads, the fact that she is unable to vocalize like everyone else. He even goes as far as to yank her hearing aids out and throw them around the class. This eventually causes the girl to leave this school. Cut to a few years later and this boy is traumatized by the way he treated this girl. He eventually became singled out to be bullied as well because of his actions towards this girl. So now that he's older, he's trying to track her down. He's trying to learn sign language properly so that he can communicate with her and seek some kind of redemption. This movie's heart-wrenching. It's extremely difficult to watch sometimes, especially if you have been a victim of this type of treatment in school. This movie is tough to watch. It's very sad sometimes, but it does things differently than other anime films. This movie sidesteps a lot of the melodrama that some animes fall into and it just focuses on youth and the struggle that so many kids go through and in particular a different viewpoint. Usually movies or anime of this vein will follow the bullied character and you feel really terrible for them and you want to see them achieve some kind of redemption. Sure, you definitely want this girl to be happy, but this movie makes the ballsy attempt to follow the bully and you see his evolution from a young kid who feels perfectly fine tossing a deaf girl's hearing aids around after school into a man who's deeply traumatized by the pain that he inflicted on others because it came back on him. Once kids saw how horrified this girl was at her treatment, they began to turn on this boy and now all of a sudden he's the enemy. So he becomes even more reclusive than this girl used to be. He doesn't even make eye contact with people anymore and the animators made a really strong creative choice to have everyone in this guy's world have a blue x over their faces and if he ever communicates with one of them or feels as if someone's trying to connect with him, you see that blue x peel away and suddenly there's a person there because you're watching somebody who no longer knows how to communicate with anyone. In fact, he really never did. His only way of communicating with people when he was young was making fun of them and so now as an adult he has to live a normal life, but he has no idea how to actually communicate with people because either he was never taught or he just never bothered to learn. What makes this film so special is that usually with anime romances you have two characters that are perfectly okay with loving each other, but there's some sort of circumstance that's keeping them apart. In this movie you have someone who does have feelings for the other, but they've done such despicable things in the past that they have no idea how to break that barrier to get a normal friendship. Plus one of the beautiful things about this movie is the conversations they have through sign language. Oftentimes it's just these really sweet scenes that are mostly silent with them signing back and forth and you read so much in their eyes and this of course is attributed to some really excellent animation. This is a beautiful looking movie and it's the kind of movie that gives me hope similar to Your Name and Other Things by Mamaru Hosoda. It gives me hope that Studio Ghibli and their difficulties financially, it's not the end of great anime films. There are tons of filmmakers out there who are going to make films like this and Your Name that are going to breach through the barrier and we're going to get into theaters here and it was really nice to see this movie. As for issues, it's very long. It's like two hours and ten minutes and there are sequences looking back where you're like, did that really have to be in the film? Conversations between side characters that do little but let you know maybe one or two things that are on their mind, but in the end it doesn't really have that much weight or impact on this story. But beyond that, I mean I really like this movie. I had a great time with it. It has interesting characters that feel real, a very heartfelt story that not too many films or anime tackle. It also has an interesting undercurrent of possibilities if you explore this angle involving reincarnation that is sort of hinted at as a metaphor and you can also look at the film in that perspective if you like to analyze films on a deeper level. A Silent Voice has a lot going for it. I'm going to give it an A-. If this does come to a theater near you, I definitely suggest checking it out, especially if you're an anime fan, but even if you're not, this could be the type of film that I could see someone who hasn't seen a lot of anime actually appreciating. So, guys, I hope you like this new anime background. I've been working on it. I just want to say to the incredible gentleman who sent me this Spike Spiegel and that Kaneda from Akira, you made my day. And you have no idea how much you made my day because at Comic-Con, I specifically went to the booth that sells those figures looking for it and they were completely sold out. You have no idea how happy I was when I opened it, so thank you so much. It really means a lot to me. And as always, guys, thank you so much for watching. Look forward to more anime reviews and other reviews coming very soon. If you like this, you can click right here and get Stuckmanized.