Behind A Silent Voice’s immaculate, gorgeous animation, is direction so strong, so careful, and so well constructed, that it asserts Naoko Yamada as one of the great storytellers in modern animation.
Yamada has an interesting obsession with using feet, perhaps the least expressive part of the body, to tell the emotional story. She does it masterfully over fifty-some shots, each distinct and effective. In the first scene, Shoya Ishida stands on a bridge, to jump from it, his feet move with a quiet, relaxed precision, he is completely ready. The gentle camera shake as a car drives past, showing the discord humming underneath.
Contrastingly, the young Shoya walks loosely, carelessly. His feet moving all over, just to go forward. Then we see Shoko Nishimiya, a timid deaf girl who’s joining Shoya’s school. She also walks loosely, but she’s trying to hold that in, trying to reach normal, but not quite making it. Later her feet reflect on the floor, highlighting her isolation, the empty space surrounding, accompanied only be herself.
Despite working perfectly on it’s own merits, this technique is even tied into the narrative. The older Shoya, ashamed of his past, of bullying Nishimiya, keeps his eyes to the ground. He can’t bare to see anyone else. As crosses cover their faces, all he sees is their feet.
This is not to imply the movie is without flaws, though most all are born from the writing, or more-so, the adaptation. For one, the consistent use of sign language is inherently clunkier in this medium. Yoshitoki Ōima’s manga just captions it like normal dialogue, here character have to say what they sign. It works well enough, but is somewhat inelegant.
And, again naturally, the manga fleshes out certain characters more. Despite doing a very good job overall, Reiko Yoshida is a little too admiring of the source material in refusing to cut out the most unnecessary characters. Though she does cut a whole plot thread about making a film, for the better. Satoshi Mashiba is the most obvious character to drop, when Shoya later pushes everyone away, insulting them as deeply as he can, the best he can come up with for Satoshi is ‘outsider.’
But the condensing of characters isn’t all bad. With Nishimiya’s Mother, Yaeko, there is a real sense of depth that we can feel, though are not fully shown. Even Shoya’s Sister and her Boyfriend add a sense of life, a world outside the main character’s drama.
These flaws feel negated, or at least forgotten, by the films searing honesty. Especially about the cruelty of children, though this is now becoming a trend in Anime with the wonderful Mirai. As the young Nishimiya’s deafness becomes increasingly burdensome to her class, they start to turn on her. Bad mouthing and keeping away. One shot shows four pairs of feet walking briskly, and then another trying to keep up, Nishimiya.
Shoya watches as the mood around her changes, and channels it, mirrors it. Everyone happy to laugh along. Both the aggressive Naoko Ueno and the passive Miki Kawai giggle as tell Shoya he’s going too far. When the class is asked to spend three minutes of homeroom to learn sign language they refuse. The Teacher distantly adjusts his glasses, he does not intervene.
Eventually the bullying goes too far, Nishimiya keeps ‘losing’ her hearing aids, and the Head-Teacher gets involved. Then, everyone turns on Shoya. Perhaps most despicably Miki, who cries when he accuses her back. She can’t believe that someone like her could ever do something like that. But she did, she knows it.
A montage of Shoya bullying Nishimiya is repeated, now with Shoya as the victim. There is no justice, there isn’t really a change. Just a new target. With a different justification to do what they already wanted to.
The older Shoya isn’t let off the hook either, in fact he is even more sharply critiqued. Not just in spite of, but because of his damage. In the egotism born of his anxieties. Through the crossed-out faces of his peers, Shoya hears, in his own voice, their whispered words. All about him. And during that first scene, where Shoya goes to kill himself, he sees a vision of sorts. He’s standing on the bridge. Sunlight orange and blaring. His arms held out. Like Christ himself.
Even his pursuits to help Nishimiya, to redeem himself, to pay off his sins, are not shown simply. Both Yuzuru, Nishimiya’s younger Sister and Naoko, accuse him of doing this only for himself, just to feel better, just to sleep at night.
There’s certainly a part of him that is more interested in forgetting than negating what he’s done, even though he genuinely cares for, even loves, Nishimiya. He never actually apologised for what he did, and after losing himself in a day at an amusement park, when he’s reminded, by running into one of the boys he bullied Nishimiya with, he crossed his and Naoko’s faces. He looks away. Even when he first meets Nishimiya again, he can hardly look at her, at what he’s done. And he runs away.
Despite all this, the film never feels cold. It has a real, heartfelt, and full empathy for these deeply deeply flawed characters. Underneath the cruelty, the selfishness, the self destruction, is a longing, a melancholy. They want nothing more than to communicate, to connect to one another. They just don’t know how.
Yamada conveys this so beautifully with Shoya and Nishimiya. When they first meet again, they never share a shot, an uncomfortable amount of negative space filling the frames. Later, as they start to open up, they message whilst standing opposite one another on a train. When they share a wide shot, we see the window, the scenery rushing past, the whole world still between them. Finally, in their climactic scene together, they share shots the whole time. The singles shot over the shoulder for the only time.
If it seems like this is a story about Shoya, one that Nishimiya is just a totem in, that is by design. Not just the film’s, but Nishimiya’s. She hides her pain behind an awkward smile. Locking everyone else out. When she tells Shoya she loves him, she does with her shaky, warped voice, that he clearly cannot understand.
More scathingly, Naoko asserts that although she didn’t understand Nishimiya, Nishimiya never tried to understands her either. She was so consumed by her own pain, her own victimhood, that she couldn’t see anyone else. Not so different from Shoya. Both born from their deep self hatred. When Shoya finally see this, he calls out to her, screaming her name. Shoko.
Along with Yamada’s masterful directing, the film is driven by Kensuke Ushio’s heart-rending score. You can feel the emotion weighing down in the lightest and heaviest presses of the piano keys, the instrument at the core of the soundtrack. But the music is always sparse, never overbearing, and knows when to step away, during the aforementioned emotional climax between Shoya and Shoko, it gives them space.
Even during the very last scene, thought the music swells, it does so with few instruments. Somehow pulling the emotions out even more. Making that scene one I can never make it through without tearing up. But not just tearing up, crying in the ugliest, snottiest way, continuing all through the minutes of credits. Even now, on my fourth watch, with the distance of analysis, I wept.
