a silent voice / koe no katachi (2016)

PLOT: Schoolboy Ishida has a great life until Nishimiya shows up as a new student who is deaf. The ways in which he and different characters react to her deafness causes a social crisis among them, and as a result Ishida becomes a social outcast and Nishimiya transfers schools. Years later, Ishida learns sign language and finds Nishimiya and asks her to be friends, in order to make amends before planning to commit suicide. He finds, however, that the prospect of friendship gives him something to live for. Stuff happens that spans I think seven manga volumes and is all stuffed into a two hour film in a way that is super confusing and tbh kind of boring.

This is a film that had perhaps great intentions but fell exasperatingly short of them. The story with the topics of disability (deafness) and mental health (social ostracization and suicide), but ultimately, because the film tries to do so many things at once and ultimately fails in fleshing out its large character cast, these topics feel more like dramatizing plot points and are not given the attention to detail they deserve.

First, the positive: The romantic undertones in this movie were dealt with a very light touch, which I appreciated. The viewer got the sense that part of the reason Ueno participated in Nishimiya's bullying was that she had feelings for Ishida, and it was clear that this unrequited longing continued to factor into her character's actions five years later. This tension was conveyed without the writers having to spell it out explicitly. The female characters in general were portrayed in a surprisingly and relatively non-gendered way, which is a testament perhaps to the fact that Kyoto Animation was founded by a woman? Idk I just read that somewhere lol.

The negatives, and only the negatives that I have the energy to write about (there were a lot):

Nishimiya is portrayed very statically as a shy, deaf girl who always has a smile on her face, is very quick to say sorry, who just wants to be friends, who wants to be friends with our male protagonist Ishida despite him literally throwing a ball of dirt into her face and called her disgusting when they first met because he ~didn't know how to act upon his confused feelings about her deafness, he realizes years later, so he had decided to react in a most toxically masculine way~. Though we do see her exasperated side when she reciprocates Ishida's violence during their fight at school, she immediately accepts his request for friendship when they reunite five years later, for no reason other than I guess this is what a girl has to do in order to not piss off a guy and possibly give him a reason to blame her for his decision to commit suicide - but of course she has a character showed no sign of this kind of decision-making. Her niceness and ability to forgive Ishida is hailed as the reason he does not go through with his suicide, but her character is in turn given no depth whatsoever. Her deafness is simply a device that lays a path for Ishida to make terrible decisions and then feel bad about them and try to make up for them, while all along she is blindly supportive and uncritical of him. She is, both literally and figuratively, a voiceless victim through which our protag is able to find self-actualization without having to be critical of his process. It's like they didn't even try!

I hope you get better portrayals in future films about deafness my cute honeypie *squishes cheeks bc you're cute but also bc this film convinces me you're just an object :( *

Ishida is quite frankly an idiot who has no social skills, which I guess makes sense because apparently he doesn't even need them because the other characters like him for no apparent reason. He is a flawed character who I imagine garners more sympathy in the manga, in which there is probably room for his character's internal life to be explored more fully. I found him unfathomably thoughtless and lame. There is probably no character trope I loathe more than the male protagonist who is supposed to be heroic simply because he realizes his mistakes and tries to fix them but nonetheless continues to make similar mistakes without consequence. Are our standards for men so low that this is enough? Whatever, I'M OVER IT, I shout into the void. Ishida's suicide was treated too nonchalantly by other characters and by the film, which seems to gloss over the serious mental health burden that accompanies the decision to commit suicide and treats suicide as a singular event. The depiction could have been much worse, but was still disappointing.

Don't really recommend this film, but wanted it ~on record~ that, as much as it pains me to say, this film is worse than Kimi no Na Wa, though I would consider both exceptionally bad. Is the anime film dead as a genre? Was Miyazaki the only good thing to have ever happened to us? I really hope not!!!