Krish1835

One word: poignant.

This movie brings up one of the deepest communication problems in every society. How a deaf hardly tries to be accepted just like everyone else. How she tries to establish an emotional connection with her classmates not with tongue but with her very only language (her hands), which soon appears not to be most welcome to her classmates.

Then we see how she tries to establish that very basic emotional connection with her tongue on certain situations later on, which doesn't come up successful either. The elementary students were the symbol of immature conscience of the society, showing how cruel and unfair it can be and how damage this immature conscience could deal without understanding the consequences.

The blurry plot of the two shadows walking toward the light, which was shown at both the beginning and the end, may be the two young and mature Ishida walking side by side. The mature Ishida is holding the younger's hand and trying to explain things to him, trying to help him grow. Maybe walking toward his past and try to fix everything, the younger Ishida has done... This anime also shows how disability can negatively affect one's self esteem, which pushes that person even further away from people around them.

The movie tells us this importance, that as a human, away from gender, race... life only finds its meaning if we could fit within the society we live in, and if can't, suicide looks to be the only choice left, whether we have some sort of disability (like Nishimiya) or fully functional (like Ishida). Moreover, this has two sides; one is how hard we try as an individual who seeks to fulfill his/her needs, and on the other, how the society embraces us open-heartedly.

The red fish in the river was the symbol of Ishida and Nishimiya. Despite of being surrounded by fishes (people) around them in daily life, still so lonely one can be... A delicate thing about this movie is we have no perfect characters. Even those who seem to accept Nishimiya, really don't try to expand this acceptance to their classmates and only see that as a one on one communication which in fact is not. There is another well thought thing in this movie which is how open people with disability are to start a relationship/friendship, and this is not limited to people with disability but the same goes to those who don't have that appealing looks or are not that sociable like Nagatsuka.

One thing that bothered me though, was that there was no hugs between Nishimiya and Ishida throughout the movie. I literally missed one when Ishida runs from the hospital and meets Nishimiya on the bridge. A hug could have made me fully cry... If I want to divide this movie into two wings, one wing carries a poignant social reality and the other, carries a love story at the same time. However, to be honest the love story was kind of a failure and the movie didn't really dealt with it as well as it did with the social part.

In a way that at the end, it's like there was no love between the main characters at all, and that makes viewers, start to lose their emotional connection with the story at the very end. I want to end my review with this sentence; Bullying has two victims. Teach it to your children. Final words: "A silent voice" is a beautiful anime that has a touching story with sensational music that nicely lies within the flow of the movie covered by warm and well polished plots that is not unexpected from a well made anime.

9/10