A Silent Voice (Koe no Katachi) (2016)
Koe no Katachi is a bit of dream project for me. I enjoyed the source material written and drawn Yoshitoki Oima, so I was confident in the actual story being told, and the film adaptation would be produced by Kyoto Animation, reuniting the Naoko Yamada (director)/Reiko Yoshida (writer) team that elevated K-On! beyond its simple 4-koma origins.
Perhaps I was a bit naive in thinking that Yamada/Yoshida team make lightning strike twice, particularly given the uneven nature of Tamako Market, but I assumed that being constrained by an adaptation would provide them with more focus. What I didn’t take into account was that it would be near impossible to take a long running manga and turn it into a 2 hour film. It’s a problem that I saw before in the Kids on the Slope adaptation, which suffered greatly by trying to fit a long running story into a short 12 episode run, but I just assumed that the Yamada/Yoshida team would have been able to make it work.
While I was quite disappointed in the film as adaptation when I first saw it back in June, I’ve softened my stance since then. I do think the film is still problematic — many, if not all, of the secondary characters should have been cut — but knowing that I could safely ignore all of the side plots the second time around allowed me to enjoy the “heart” of the story that much more.
That heart of the film, of course, is the relationship between Shoko Nishimiya and Shoya Ishida (they’re both Sho-chan, as the film points out). The first act of the film takes place in grade school, where we are introduced to the cast of characters as young children. Nishimiya is a girl who is deaf and is unable to properly communicate with any of the students around her. She makes up for this shortcoming by being overly selfless, trying her best to be helpful and not be a burden to the class (we see how much of the work she did when she leaves the school and the teacher wonders why none of the classroom chores have been done). Eventually all the students begin to resent her, culminating with Ishida actively bullying her by stealing and destroying her hearing aids. When Ishida points out that the rest of the class was just as complicit in bullying Nishimiya, the class ostracizes him as quickly as they ostracized Nishimiya, and he’s begins to see his isolation as a form of penance for his previous behavior.
As a teenager, Ishida comes to hate himself and decides to take his own life — but only after he finds Nishimiya and properly apologizes to her. After he meets her, he realizes that suicide is not the way out and he decides to try his best to live his life. It’s from that moment that the film takes off, and we see the awkward attempts that Ishida makes to try to connect with Nishimiya and the other people who come into his life.
The second act is where the film flourishes, with a lot of visual sequences to depict the social isolation that Ishida experiences in his life.
The Xs over the faces of the people around him is perhaps the most obvious visual indicator of Ishida’s psychology, as he externalizes his social isolation from everyone else by trying not to make any human connections. It’s an indicator that pays off at the end of the film when he learns that he shouldn’t isolate himself and the Xs fall off everyone’s faces.
What I found the most enjoyable about the film was how Yamada used framing to show isolation, both from the point of view of the external audience and also from the point of view of the characters.
For example, the film often frames the characters off-center, creating sequences with a lot negative space:
Even without context, the fact that Ishida is in the corner of the frame instead of in the center of the frame is enough to show how he feels in this scene.
Several sequences showing Nishimiya and Ishida interacting with each other are framed in a similar manner.
When the characters reunite and connect with each other, we can literally see the characters bridging the gap between them (and on a bridge, no less) by how the framing pushes them together. They are still somewhat separated from each other, because there is a tentativeness in their interactions, but we subconsciously see that the characters are having a shared moment.
The film uses this type of framing at the end of the film:
You would expect the characters to be really close to each other at this point, but the framing suggests otherwise. Unlike the scene above, the negative space literally pushes the characters apart from each other and we understand why — Nishimiya has resolved to commit suicide, and Ishida has no idea that Nishimiya hates her own life as much as he hates his life. In fact, this moment probably represents the biggest gulf between them in their entire relationship.
The film also borrows the visual language of objectification through framing to help illustrate how the characters see the world around them:
Here, Ishida is unable and unwilling to meet Ueno’s gaze. It’s an effective use of objectification to illustrate the way that these characters look at the others around them. In the Mulvey sense, scopophilic objectification is meant to produce and reproduce sexual desire, but here Yamada turns this objectification into a revelation about the characters — that they think so little of themselves and of the others around them that they can only see people as a generic mass of body parts and not as individuals with unique motivations and desires.
It’s also not just Ishida, since the idea of the story is that everyone has their own personal issues to deal with. Here’s how Sahara sees the people around her when she reunites with the main group after their big fight:
Yamada also uses objectification when the camera isn’t necessarily depicting a specific point of view. In the big confrontation where Ishida calls out everyone’s personal issues, we don’t see any of the characters as people:
Even Nagatsuka on the left, who is too short to be cut off by the frame, has his head obscured by the tree to make the point that the characters are being reduced and essentialized to their particular character flaws in this scene. Again, even without context, you can get an impression of what Yamada is trying to convey in this scene. It’s a technique that she uses fairly often in the film as a way to show how Ishida sees the world. It’s both a sad outlook, because is isolated from society, but it’s also an enlightening one because he’s the only one who can see these people for who they truly are.
Incidentally, the film has a scene where the characters watch a video clip that reproduces the male gaze:
There’s something clever about having the audience experience the objectified gaze mediated by the characters watching a video, considering the fact that the entire experience is mediated. The interesting part is that this scene is an important moment of character development between Ueno and Nishimiya, when Ueno confronts Nishimiya over her passive personality. It’s a dramatic moment where all you can really see are the two characters’ legs, which makes the confrontation somehow more personal and cutting than if we were non-diegetic observers able to see the characters’ faces.
There are also visually striking sequences that made the film pop. In this sequence of shots, we get a clear understanding of how Ishida sees his relationship with Nishimiya:
We can see that Nishimiya casts a shadow over Ishida — of course, it’s a literal shadow in this scene, but we know that she has loomed over him since the very beginning of the film. The fact that she is bathed in light and is almost ethereal and angelic when he looks up at her only reinforces how highly he sees her. But soon after we see that her view of her has been all wrong, that in his own self-pity and martyrdom, he hasn’t been able to see her for who she is — a person with her own flaws and insecurities. It’s a mistake that is nearly fatal, because, as discussed earlier, he isn’t able to see that she has her own suicidal thoughts.
There are many more visual moments in the film that I could talk about. Yuzuru, Nishimiya’s younger sister, is a photographer and we see the world mediated both through her camera lens and through the morbid photographs of dead animals that she collects. Nearly every interaction uses framing and editing in some way to show isolation and internal psychology, which gives the film as a whole a much more “novelistic” feel than one might find in a typical movie. Of course, the fact that KyoAni produced the film is also a guarantee that the animation will be top notch, and on that level the film certainly does not disappoint.
But as I mentioned near the beginning of this review, my biggest issue with the film is how it adapted the source material. The heart of the story still works — Ishida and Nishimiya’s relationship, and the relationship between their families — and is enough to carry the film to its inevitable conclusion where Ishida and Nishimiya find in each other a partner that will help them cope with the realities of life.
The film opens and closes with a shot of two figures creating light in the darkness, and we understand that they may have a long way to go to heal, but that they’ll be able to cope with whatever happens to them as long as they have each other.
The problem is that the adaptation lets down all the other characters in the film by virtue of not having the time to properly develop them. Ishida’s childhood friends and grade school teacher, for example, play a much bigger part in the manga and become important parts in Ishida’s journey of healing and self-discovery. In the film, all of that is boiled down to a quick reunion with Shimada at the theme park and a brief note at the end that Shimada and Hirose were the ones who saved Ishida after he fell into the river near the end of the film.
Sahara, Kawai, and Mashiba are also underdeveloped as well and Mashiba’s role in the group is so marginalized one wonders why he was even part of the friend group in the first place. The fact that Ishida calls him an outsider somewhat “lampshades” his inclusion in the friend group, but it highlights the problem as well. In the manga, Mashiba has his own issues that he needs to deal with, like everyone else in the story. But the film doesn’t have any time to bring that story up, and so we’re left with a character who is there only because he was in the manga and not because he’s integral to the film’s version of the story.
Ueno is perhaps the biggest victim in the process of adapting the manga to film, because her motivations are completely unclear. While I’m fine with her story being softened, and she still has time to explain why she hates Nishimiya, it’s not clear why she cares about Ishida — particularly years after they presumably drifted apart after elementary school. When Ishida is hospitalized, we see Ueno visit and stay in his room every single day that he is in a coma, but we’re never told why she cares so much about him or why his mother would even let her be with him when she is essentially a stranger. The manga version of Ueno is caught in a love triangle with Nishimiya and sees her as a rival, and while one might argue that it’s better that the film version of the character isn’t trapped by that cliche, one can’t avoid the fact that in the film she has no motivation whatsoever to want to be involved in Ishida’s life. If she’s around only because she hates Nishimiya, it just makes her even more petty.
Perhaps the biggest problem I have with the film is that it shouldn’t have been a film. This story should have been told in a 12–13 episode season, if not a 24–26 episode season like K-On!! or Hyouka. If they were able to fully adapt the manga and it’s various story arcs, we’d have a more complete picture of all the supporting cast and be able to understand one of the bigger themes of the film — that everyone, whether the bullied or the bullies, has their own issues that they need to overcome and that shutting one’s self from the world is not the solution. Alternatively, Yamada and Yoshida might have considered condensing the film even further by removing characters like Shimada and Mashiba entirely and just focusing on the more “important” characters like Ueno and Sahara. Instead we’re left with an adaptation that is compromised, neither fulfilling the narrative arc of the source material nor fully succeeding as a film on its own.
Don’t get me wrong. I still like the film for what it is, but I can’t help but see the flaws in the story. Considering how well the K-On!! and Tamako Market films turned out, I can’t help but be disappointed that this film isn’t as well written as those ones.
Before I end this review, I wanted to at least bring up the fact that mental health issues — at least as depicted in anime — are always problematic for me because children are essentially left to deal with their own traumas on their own. The parents do the best they can, but the children are essentially left to process their own negative feelings and discover by themselves that suicide should not be considered an option.
The fact that there are no authority figures to speak of — the teachers don’t intervene in the bullying, for example — is something that I also find unusual as well. This year in a school district in Nova Scotia, three teenagers committed suicide due to bullying, so this isn’t something that I think is strictly confined to Japan, the Japanese school system, or how the Japanese treat mental health problems. But it’s a bit sad that the lesson of A Silent Voice is that you have to learn to overcome your own problems — that you have to reach out to others for help, when maybe, others should be looking for people who are vulnerable and helping them out as well.
Now maybe it would be silly of me to expect all teachers to be like Onizuka from Great Teacher Onizuka, but there has to be a balance between asking kids to stop crying and get over their mental health issues and having teachers smash down walls in order to save their students from bullying/family issues/gang members/etc.
I also wanted to acknowledge that localization is a hard business, and while I don’t blame the dub producers for ignoring the homophone joke that comes in the middle of the film when Ishida mistakes “suki” (love) for “tsuki” (moon), they could have at least tried to do something with that scene to make the misunderstanding make sense in English. This is an issue in Your Name as well, with the gendered first person pronouns that simply have no equivalent in English. It’s a relatively minor quibble, because again I understand how difficult it can be, but if you’re watching a dub of the film the joke falls completely flat because of the localization.
As a final note, this film closes out the “trilogy” of prestige Japanese anime films released in 2016. While I think all three have their merits, In This Corner of the World is my favorite of the three, with Your Name being second and A Silent Voice coming in a close third. Of course, the Kantai Collection film gets an honorable mention because it’s Star Wars mixed with Apocalypse Now (and no, I’m not joking!).
