![]() But the story isn’t about just the two of them. It’s unquestionably a melodrama, to the point where the characters sometimes feel exaggerated past the point of belief: Ishida’s obliviousness and Nishimiya’s kindness both get frustrating after a while, until the story reveals what’s really going on under both of them. What makes A Silent Voice so remarkable is the thoughtful ways it takes all those different characters’ perspectives and needs into account. From there, A Silent Voice spirals outward in a number of surprising ways, as many of the two teenagers’ former schoolmates resurface with their own interpretations of what happened back in grade school, and their own emotional conflicts to navigate. 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. When Ishida encounters Nishimiya again, it’s a chance for him to learn how to reconnect. He’s so deeply lost in his feelings of worthlessness that he doesn’t even try to communicate. In the present day, high school-aged Ishida is a self-loathing pariah who refuses to look anyone in the eye, and visualizes everyone in his school as walking around with giant X-es over their faces, signifying how he sees them as unapproachable. His friends shun him and he withdraws into guilt and confusion. The tension comes to a head in several different surprising ways, but one of them results in Nishimiya being sent to another school, while Ishida is branded with sole responsibility for tormenting her. Nishimiya, a meek and smiling girl who just wants friends, just apologies to Ishida for everything cruel he does to her, which makes him even angrier. Fascinated and repelled by her for reasons he doesn’t understand, Ishida relentlessly bullies her, as the rest of the class laughs or watches passively, refusing to intervene. Then a deaf girl, Shoko Nishimiya, joins his classroom. In a slow and thoughtful opening that switches rapidly between past and present, elementary school student Shoya Ishida hangs out with his friends in an enviously casual way, joyously running between one small childhood adventure and another. Plenty of high school media addresses bullying, but Yamada’s adaptation of Yoshitoki Oima’s manga veers away from the pat and familiar narratives, and dives so deep into teenage emotions that the weight is almost staggering. It’s a particularly raw look at the damage young people can do to each other without intending to, and without any way of predicting the scope of their actions. Naoko Yamada’s emotionally intense 2016 movie A Silent Voice, leaving Netflix on June 4, focuses on specific areas that most high school stories won’t touch. (Just look at Mean Girls - Rachel McAdams was 26 when she played Regina George in that movie.)īut anime high school series are more likely to tap into the uncertain aspects of being a teenager - especially the awkwardness around managing emotions, and deciding what’s safe or smart to reveal to other people. American media about high school usually heightens that dynamic in different ways from Japanese media, often presenting students as precocious, self-defined, and so hyper-verbal that they seem like particularly petty adults. And while young people often don’t recognize this until much later in life, it’s often a period where they’re learning how to be human and how to understand other humans, without guidelines or a basic toolkit. ![]() It’s no particular wonder why so much anime across so many genres and eras focuses on high school settings: It’s a intense period full of radical new experiences.
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