We’re going to be diving into an animated movie called, “A Silent Voice” or “The Shape of Voice” whichever title you prefer.  It was produced by Kyoto Animation, directed by Naoko Yamada and written by Reiko Yoshida. With that said I would like to thank everyone in involved in the making of this awesome movie.

Now this movie mostly revolves around two main characters who are Shoya and Shoko. Shoko transferred over to Shoko’s elementary school where everyone learned that she was deaf and had to wear hearing aides in order to hear at least a little bit. But, still preferred to communicate with everyone through her notebook. For some reason, Shoya and her friends start bullying her and anyone trying to befriend her. Until one day, Shoko’s mom makes an complaint to the school which in turn makes Shoya’s friends turn on him in order to save themselves from punishment.

With the bullying and harassment exposed Shoya’s mom was forced to pay back all the money to Shoko’s family in compensation to him breaking or taking her hearing aides. Shoya learned three life lessons during this time:

Karma is a bitch

During tough or dire situations, you find out who your real friends are

That all of your actions come with rewards and consequences

In this his case very harsh consequences because not only did his family have to give up the money to Shoko’s family, but he also lost all his friends and everything he did to her was being done to him. This stuck with him even after Shoko suddenly transferred out to another school. Eventually, he did get to transfer to another school too, but the mental and emotional damage was already done by then because in his new school he didn’t have any friends there either, he had trouble looking at people in the eye and his depression seemed to be so bad that his mind couldn’t even bother to remember people faces. The people not important to him in his life had huge Xs over their faces showing that he didn’t really care for their existence so the only people that initially didn’t have an X over their was face were pretty much family members.

Fate seems to intervene once more with Shoko and Shoya reuniting in a sign language class. Shoya wants to redeem himself for his past mistakes concerning her, so he decides to befriend her.Then, the beautiful drama journey between these two is born. This is a total tear jerker of a movie and if you watch this movie and you don’t shed a tear then I’m pretty sure you don’t have a soul.

In this movie, new friendships are born, old ones are renewed, jealousy and love are sprung and speaking of jealousy I think Naoka had a crush on Shoya because of the fact that she blames Shoko for how their friendship ended in elementary school and now how Shoko and Shoya seem to be so close now. So, she ends up becoming a bitter bitch in trying to sabotage their new found friendship anyway she can. What I think Naoko never ever understood from that childhood experience was that their little group of friends weren’t really friends to begin with because even if Shoko wasn’t in the picture; some other time in the future something else was going to break them apart. Also, she had plenty of time after the incident to rekindle her friendship with Shoya but the fact that she never bothered because she was afraid of becoming an social outcast herself spoke volumes to me.

Anyway, I really loved this movie it moved my heart to tears. Their are a lot of life lessons to be learned in it, makes you appreciate life as a whole and how it shows you that things can always get better with time plus the movie itself was overall beautiful. I recommend anime and non-anime watchers to definitely watch, but if you don’t feel like crying your eyes out while watching it, I will understand.

Thanks For Reading!