It’s no wonder so much anime in so many genres and eras focuses on high school: it’s an intense period filled with radically new experiences. And while young people often don’t realize this until much later in life, it’s often a period when they learn how to be human and how to understand other people, without guidelines or a basic toolkit. American high school media tends to reinforce that dynamic in a different way than Japanese media, often presenting students as precocious, self-defined, and so hyperverbal as to appear particularly small adults. (Just look at Mean girls – Rachel McAdams was 26 when she played Regina George in that movie.)
But high school anime series are more likely to tap into the insecure aspects of being a teen — especially the awkwardness around dealing with emotions and deciding what’s safe or smart to reveal to other people. Naoko Yamada’s emotionally intense 2016 film A silent voice, which leaves Netflix on June 4, focuses on specific areas that most high school stories won’t touch. It’s a particularly raw look at the harm young people can do to each other without meaning to and without any way of predicting the scope of their actions. Many high school media outlets tackle bullying, but Yamada’s adaptation of Yoshitoki Oima’s manga deviates from the pat and familiar stories, delves so deeply into teenage emotions that the weight is almost staggering.
In a slow and thoughtful opening that quickly shifts between past and present, elementary school student Shoya Ishida hangs out with his friends in a jealously casual manner, happily running between one little childhood adventure and another. Then a deaf girl, Shoko Nishimiya, enters his class. Fascinated and repulsed by her for reasons he cannot understand, Ishida relentlessly bullies her, while the rest of the class laughs or watches passively, refusing to intervene. Nishimiya, a meek and smiling girl who just wants friends, apologizes to Ishida for everything he does cruelly to her, which makes him even more angry.
The tension comes to a head in several surprising ways, but one of them leads to Nishimiya being sent to another school, while Ishida is branded solely responsible for tormenting her. His friends avoid him and he retreats in guilt and confusion. In the present day, Ishida, a high school student, is a self-loathing pariah who refuses to look anyone in the eye and imagines everyone in his school walking around with giant Xs across their faces, indicating how he views them as unapproachable. . He gets so caught up in his feelings of worthlessness that he doesn’t even try to communicate.
When Ishida encounters Nishimiya again, it’s an opportunity for him to learn how to reconnect. He sincerely regrets how he treated her, but that doesn’t mean he’s come to understand why he did it, or that he knows how to communicate with her after his years of social isolation. From there, A silent voice spirals out in some surprising ways, as many of the two teens’ former classmates resurface with their own interpretations of what happened in grade school, and their own emotional conflicts to navigate.
Image: Kyoto animation
What makes A silent voice so remarkable are the thoughtful ways in which the perspectives and needs of all those different characters are taken into account. It’s a melodrama without a doubt, to the point where the characters sometimes feel exaggerated beyond the point of belief: Ishida’s ignorance and Nishimiya’s kindness both become frustrating after a while, until the story reveals what’s really going on between them both. But the story is not just about the two of them. It’s about how people have many different reasons to be nice or cruel to each other, and how high school struggles tend to be much more complicated and nuanced than the versions of them in TV and movies.
A silent voice can be emotionally jarring: the movie doesn’t stay away from suicidal behavior and even suicide attempts, and several characters break down crying under the strain of the things they’re going through. Yamada contrasts all dark impulses and gloomy moments with a bright, sunny palette, often returning to images of light shimmering from the water and bright koi swimming to the surface of that water to be fed. Everything on screen in it A silent voice glows with sunlit energy – even the moments of despair and fear. It’s almost perversely beautiful because it explores human ugliness. Even small details, like the way Ishida’s T-shirt tag continually curls up from under his collar, are used to tell the story.
But all those big emotions are also cathartic and compelling, especially in the amount of nuance this story gives them, and how thoroughly it refuses to fall back on simple black-and-white thinking about childhood and young adult misbehavior. Left alone with each other, Ishida and Nishimiya would easily navigate their past and find a balanced future. But their choices — and the places where they weren’t given choices — impacted everyone around them, and those traumas also need to be overcome before anyone can move on.
A silent voice is an odd film to watch for those who have been bullied, given how sympathetically the central bully is viewed and how empathetically explored the ways he had to suffer when held accountable for his behavior. But it also openly suggests that everyone is capable of redemption if they put in the work, and that the causes of bullying are much more complicated than “some kids are just bad and need to be beaten.” The filmmakers here understand that the road to an emotionally complete adult is rocky for everyone, and it celebrates the young people making an authentic effort to walk that path. It’s a unique and eye-catching film, and well worth checking out as long as it’s still readily available.