‘A Silent Voice’ is a beautiful animated film about redemption, empathy, and the power of forgiveness. The movie is adapted from the amazing manga under the same title by Yoshitoki Oima. The movie, released in 2016 with an Oscar nomination, has a wonderful coming-of-age story with themes that hadn’t been tackled before in animation or media in a way that is quite as impactful as this film is.
The film centers around the main character, Shoya Ishida, beginning in his childhood through his senior year of high school. When he was a child in middle school, he cruelly bullied the new girl in his class, Shoko Nishimiya, because she was deaf. He would tease her, mock her, and find new ways every week to destroy her hearing aids. Shoya was not alone in this treatment of Shoko, the entire class either participated in the bullying or turned a blind eye to it. Eventually, Shoko ends up transferring schools due to the bullying. After this happens, Shoya ends up getting the blame from most of the class for being the reason why she left. Subsequently, Shoya loses all of his friends and remains friendless until the movie continues in his last year of high school. At this time, he was suffering from severe guilt from his actions and major social isolation to the point that he didn’t really know how to interact with others anymore. A symbolic element of his character is whenever he looks at another person, he doesn’t see their face, instead, a big purple “X” is drawn over their faces. This shows the kind of pain that Shoya feels when he looks at another person as if he can’t even look them in the eye, he hides himself away in the fear that someone will hate him or isolate him as he has been throughout all his teenage years.
Shoya’s final promise to himself before he enacts his plan to take his own life, is to find Shoko Nishimiya and apologize for everything that he’s done. He put in the work to learn sign language so that he could communicate with her and show her just how much he changed and wanted to change. The movie starting on such a melancholic tone, really sets the stage for the film. When I was watching for the first time, I believed that Shoya was going to kill himself after he saw Shoko for the first time. Luckily, when the next day rolls around, Shoya’s mother finds out about his plan and manages to get him to promise that he won’t kill himself. From then on out, Shoya decides to continue visiting Shoko in the hopes that he can somehow, one day redeem himself to her.
As the film progresses, Shoya starts to get closer to Shoko to the point where they are friends and even begin to form a small friend group filled with people from their old middle school. Throughout the movie, we can see not only Shoya’s perspective on the whole situation but also how Shoko had been affected by the bullying throughout her life and the kind of damage it had done to her mental health. The Japanese sign language in this movie is animated beautifully and gives life to her character and her personality. Shoko is shown to feel a lot of guilt throughout the movie for what happened to Shoya and how he lost all of his friends. She is also shown to have a lot of self-hatred towards herself for being deaf and getting the feeling that she ruins everything. Similar to Shoya, she had not made any friends since she had transferred from middle school.
This movie is very different from a lot of other movies seen in cinemas these days. It is one of my personal favorites and is a movie that I will and have watched over and over again. As a hard-of-hearing person myself, the whole story really resonated with me, especially Shoko’s storyline. There aren’t a lot of movies that talk about the issues of being deaf or hard-of-hearing and definitely not many animated movies like this. It can be really easy to feel isolated and different from everybody when you can’t hear what is going on around you. Seeing someone in a movie who reflected on my struggles as a hard-of-hearing person was one of the greatest things I could ask for as a viewer.
Shoya and Shoko are two characters that are on the same coin as each other. Shoya is a bully who slowly turns into a victim by his classmates after getting singled out for his own and everybody else’s horrible actions. Shoko is a victim of bullying who ends up feeling the effects of it for the rest of her life. Oftentimes in films and media, we don’t see a redemption arc for bullies in movies or movies that are centered around a bully. While being a child never takes away from the actions one might have done to another, it does leave room for growth and to become a better person. Shoya often believes that he is not doing enough to make up for what he has done. He is always overcompensating and avoiding people at all costs, even isolating himself because he believes that he doesn’t deserve a support system. Redemption isn’t something that can come easy, including in Shoya and Shoko’s case. While it may seem like Shoko forgives him right away and maybe she does, this doesn’t get rid of the effects she is still feeling on her mental health from the bullying that she experienced. So many people like to say that they believe in change, but very few like to actually see it happen. ‘A Silent Voice’ gives one to two people who didn’t have one, who suffered in circumstances that lasted long beyond their control. Long after the credits roll, people are left thinking about the story and the characters. Change isn’t easy for anybody and empathy is what will keep people with you. The message speaks to the audience, encouraging them to reflect on their own past and their own differences. This film is a cinematic masterpiece that speaks volumes, even in the silence.
