Director – Naoko Yamada – 2016 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 130m
****
Groundbreaking and innovative Japanese drama about school children, bullying, remorse, isolation and self-loathing – plays in the Annecy Animation Festival 2022 which is taking place in a 100% on-site edition this year right now in the Special Programmes section (A Special Screening for the Hard of Hearing)
Egged on by Naoka Ueno (voice: Yuki Kaneko) then later shunned by classmates for his bullying of new girl in class Shoko Nishimiya (Saori Hayami), who happens to be deaf, Shoya Ishida (Miyu Irino) stops interacting with them and withdraws. This is represented onscreen by the extraordinary graphic device of an ‘X’ over the faces of his fellow schoolmates whenever they appear. It’s a very powerful way of expressing his isolation. Five years on, wrecked with guilt about his treatment of Nishimiya, he learns sign language and decides to befriend her and to make amends…
This film may well broaden your idea of what animation is capable. It’s nothing like Disney and equally it’s light years from Japanese SF action fest Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) although it likewise started life as a manga and concerns teenagers. These teens, however, are not rebels against the system but simply very ordinary, screwed up kids. If this were British we’d probably have made it as a live action drama, possibly for television. It feels long at 129 minutes, but that running length allows for complexities of character and plot that a shorter running length would have sacrificed.
In the end, you get to feel how a disabled person struggles to fit in as much as you do a bully’s remorse for what he’s done against an ongoing background of other interconnected minor characters. It’s a very dirty movie, but it’s the internal dirt of the mind that’s under observation here. A challenging and demanding work, it’s also an extraordinary and groundbreaking piece of animation unlike anything else you’re likely to see on the screen this year.
Beyond that, it’s innovative on another level: it will play some UK cinema screenings with hard of hearing subtitles to allow hard of hearing audience members to experience the full film, including sound effects and music. Which seems highly appropriate given its subject matter.
A Silent Voice plays in the Annecy Animation Festival 2022 which is taking place in a 100% on-site edition this year right now in the Special Programmes section (A Special Screening for the Hard of Hearing)
This review originally appeared on DMovies.org: you can find it here.
Annecy 2022 trailer:
2022
France – Annecy, Monday, 13th June – Saturday, 18th June
UK – Anime season, BFI Southbank, Monday, 28th March – Tuesday, 31st May
2107
UK cinemas from Friday, March 17th. And later on Netflix.