_A Silent Voice_
It's a pun, because one of the main characters is deaf.
You can watch this on on Netflix.
For another two weeks. It warns me June 4th is the last day.
(The screen says "the shape of voice".)
Our boy is clearing out his life. He quits his job, sells his collection (of something,) and empties his bank account to leave an envelope full of money next to a sleeping person.
He's marking the days off the calendar.
The credits play over The Who's My Generation, as we flash back to our boy in sixth grade.
Our boy, Shoya Ishida, is bored in class when a new transfer student, Shoko Nishimiya, appears.
Shoko introduces herself by writing. She can't hear.
Shoko speaks like a deaf person: she can't hear herself, so her voice is monotone and her pronunciation is off.
Ishida makes it his personal quest to mock her.
Her attempts at friendship are rebuffed and he begins a campaign of harassment.
This escalates into the destruction of her hearing aids, and the administration is called in. Ishida's coconspirators sell him out.
Ishida's mother pays Shoko's mother for the hearing aids, and (it seems) takes physical punishment as well.
Ishida becomes the target in class.
Things escalate when he catches Shoko cleaning his desk. (Removing some nasty remark.) They get in a fight.
Shoko transfers to another school.
Jump forward to the present.
Ishida has a chance (or maybe not chance) encounter with Shoko outside his sign language class. He wants to return her communication notebook, which he's held on to all this time.
He's attempted suicide at least once. His mother, who he was paying back at the opening, burns the money. She doesn't want a suicide payment.
He went to see Shoko as his final act, or so he thought. But he didn't actually jump.
He tries to see her again, but is rebuffed by one of her friends.
He accidentally rescues a classmate, Tomohiro Nagatsuka, who becomes his friend. This is the first friendly contact he's had in years.
But why are the friends? What right does he have to a friend?
Nagatsuka responds: there's no qualification; friendship is beyond words.
He tries to see Shoko again. Nagatsuka runs interference for him.
They talk about friendship and what it means. Shoko tries to show him something in the notebook, but it gets dropped in the river.
Ishida jumps in the river to retrieve it. Shoko's friend gets a photo of this and posts it to social media.
Ishida is suspended from school.
Ishida goes to the park to pick up his younger cousin, where he finds Shoko's friend, with no shoes, sleeping in the equipment.
Shoko's friend is actually her younger sister, Yuzuru.
Ishida feeds her and gives her his old shoes and takes her home.
Her mother recognizes Ishida and gives him a smack across the face.
Mom tells Yuzuru not to get involved with a guy like that.
In elementary school, Shoko had one friend: Miyoko Sahara. But she left the school suddenly. Ishida and Shoko track her down for a reunion.
A series of coincidences lead to an encounter with Ueno, a girl who was in their sixth grade class.
She hasn't improved at all, wanting to bully Shoko again and calling Shoko and Ishida's friendship fake.
Shoko has fallen for Ishida. She gives him a gift and tells him she loves him. Out loud. This is no good, because her pronunciation is off enough that Ishida thinks she said "The Moon" and doesn't understand.
(Moon/Love puns are traditional in Japanese for some reason.)
Ishida asks Yuzuru if Shoko is avoiding him. She suggests he ask her out; if she doesn't want to, she'll just say no.
Ishida invites her on a group trip to an amusement park. But someone didn't vet the guest list, because Ueno is there.
Ueno tries to engineer a reconciliation between Ishida and Kazuiki Shimada, who was Ishida's best friend in elementary school, but threw him under the bus.
This fails.
Ueno blames Shoko for... roughly everything. She pulls her aside and suggests a peace treaty.
As two people who hate each other, can the just agree to coexist?
But Ueno's assumption is wrong. Shoko doesn't hate her.
Shoko hates herself.
Yuzuru has secretly videotaped the conversation and shows it to Ishida.
He says he wants Shoko to like herself.
Ishida's nascent friend group has a falling out when his history as a bully becomes known.
He spends most of the summer with Shoko, even reconciling a bit with her mom.
They all go to the fireworks display together.
Shoko leaves early. To study, she says.
Yuzuru asks Ishida if he will go get her camera, which brings him to their home just in time to stop Shoko's suicide attempt.
And because this is that kind of movie, in his attempts to pull her back up after her jump, he falls off himself.
Ishida is in a coma.
Shoko blames herself for the fallout among his friends and wants to work to bring them back together.
She meets with everyone, even of it takes standing in the rain outside their work every night.
Ishida finally wakes up. He is driven by one thought: he never really _apologized_ for the things he did wrong.
Before, and after.
He thinks he drove her to suicide by thoughtlessly putting pressure on her.
No, she says. She just wanted to disappear.
Please, he asks, I want you to help me live.
And in sign (as far as I can read,) please be my friend.
After his recovery, Shoko takes him back to school for to meet up with everyone again. (At the school festival, of course. This is anime.)
And what we see, ultimately, is that Ishida has been suffering from some form of social anxiety. He can't look anyone in the eye.
Social interaction makes him sick to his stomach.
Nagatsuka tracks him down to pull him out of his shell.
His friends have been worried about him. They've been working on folding 1000 paper cranes (a traditional good luck/get well charm.)
As they wander through the festival grounds, he has an epiphany: he has friends who love him and care for him.
Even the strangers don't seem so threatening.
So that's the movie.
What's my takeaway?
I'm really not sure.
Is this a love story? It doesn't really make sense as one.
Maybe it's a story of damaged people who help each other overcome their damage. That kind of works.
But Ishida's damage is mostly driven by guilt over his own bad behavior.
Is it supposed to be a redemption story?
I guess, but the real meat of it must happen off screen then. Ishida learns sign language and works hard to pay back his debts before the movie begins.
He obviously regrets what he did, at least for how it hurt everyone around him.
Then what redemption is there to take place during the meat of the movie?
If the movie is about him overcoming his social isolation, then Shoko's deafness is a distraction from that story that takes up a huge chunk of screen time. That can't be it. But the ending leans that way.
I know Japanese movies don't do Oscar Bait, but it kind of feels like Shoko's deafness is a kind of pandering to make audiences feel like they're partaking in a minority culture.
Comments elsewhere say that a bunch of stuff got cut that made Shoko a bigger burden on her family.
That sounds like a lot of criticism, but it's mostly confusion over what the point actually is.
The movie is generally good, but the fact that I guess I didn't really get it leaves it somewhat hollow to me.
I want to note the way they tell you the Shoko's mother is a violent woman.
No one ever says it outright. You rarely see it on screen. But you see the blood on Ishida's mother's clothes and you know.
I'd like to appreciate the way they handle Yuzuru. Initially, her gender is ambiguous. But even once it's clarified, her style remains. And when you see her in her uniform, she looks uncomfortable.
They capture her discomfort with her gender role without ever mentioning it.
That would explain her self-loathing.
Too bad it all got lost to adaptation decay.