[Week 2] A Silent Voice
For the film club I do with friends, I'm picking a series of works by Japanese animator Naoko Yamada, whose new film The Colors Within released in the US recently. I've previously done a series on Mobile Suit Gundam, and because my friends are not well versed in the cultural context around Japanese animation, I preceded each selection with a short essay introducing the work and explaining some relevant cultural context. I'm doing that again with Yamada's works, and like with the Gundam series, I figured I could adapt these for my blog as well.
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This week we'll watch A Silent Voice (2016). In Japan, the film is known as Koe no Katachi, which translates to "The Shape of Voice".
Yamada had previously directed K-On! the Movie (2011) and Tamako Love Story (2014), making this her third feature film. However, both of those films, and all other previous films by Kyoto Animation, were extensions of existing animated series. So, A Silent Voice was Yamada's and KyoAni's first film "from scratch", unconnected to a previous television work. The film tells the story of Shōya, a former school bully attempting to atone for his treatment of a deaf classmate Shōko.
This one is actually new to me, but here's some background based on my reading.
Talkin' Bout my Adaptation
A Silent Voice was adapted from the award-winning 2013 manga series of the same name by Yoshitoki Ōima, inspired in part by Ōima's mother, a sign language interpreter. Because the manga spans seven volumes, Yamada and her frequent collaborator, screenwriter Reiko Yoshida, had to condense the story somewhat. They decided to focus on the character of Shōya and jettison parts of the story that were focused on its ensemble of secondary characters.
This was challenging for a number of reasons, including the fact that Yamada was more accustomed to portraying female protagonists. Reflecting on this in an interview, she said:
Up until now I’ve thought “I love girls, so I want to depict girls from here onwards.” Depicting boys is difficult. For example, I thought a lot about what to do if boys who saw the film thought “a guy wouldn’t do something like that.” [...] However, now that I’ve made this film, I feel that the differences between genders are incredibly trivial. If you make something by thinking “what kind of person are they” when looking at their root or the core of who they are, then the problems of “they’re a guy so…” or “they’re a girl so…” become immensely trivial.
I've read a bunch of interviews related to this film and one thing is constantly emphasized: a lot of effort was poured into bringing Shōya to life as a nuanced character with whom the audience could connect and empathize. For instance, this interview with Futoshi Nishiya, the Character designer and Chief Animation Director on this film, gives insight into the process of adapting Shōya's look from the manga for use in the film. Nishiya described early sketches as having a "sharpness", and his striving to convey more "gentleness" with subsequent iterations. Incidentally, Nishiya reunited with Yamada on her next film, Liz and the Blue Bird (2018), but sadly he passed away not long after in the 2019 arson attack on KyoAni.
The Sound of Silence
Last week while discussing the music teacher in Sound! Euphonium, we drew comparisons with the teacher from another film we watched recently, Coda (2021). Given that Coda and A Silent Voice both deal with deafness and sign language, I'll be interested in how these two films compare in that regard. Yamada is known for her interest in nonverbal communication style, specifically with regard to gesture and body language. In a roundtable interview with the animation team, Yamada noted how her aesthetic instincts about how best to draw hands didn't always mesh with the advice of the sign language supervisor.
I'm also interested in this film's treatment of deafness as a way into thinking about the relationship between moe tropes and portrayals of disability. Some half-formed thoughts about this started to coagulate in my mind as I was thinking through how best to explain the moe concept in last week's essay. I started to think about how the infantilization inherent to moe might be related to the paternalistic ways in which our culture has tended to think about disability and especially about neurodivergence. I'm not sure how much that plays into this film but there might be more to say about it in future weeks.
Although this film isn't about musicians, Yamada nevertheless continues her exploration of the sensory and emotional dimensions of sound. In an interview at Glasgow Film Festival, Yamada explained that animation is a great medium for exploring sound, because "it allows us to describe what is actually not there; if there’s no sound, I can express the lack of it through color, vibration, the drawings themselves… So I felt I was really lucky to be able to do this."
As for music, this film marks the first collaboration between Yamada and composer Kensuke Ushio, who would go on to provide music for all of her subsequent projects to date. Yamada has commented that she was so impressed with Ushio's music for A Silent Voice that it spurred her to improve the visuals so as not to "lose to" him, like a sort of competitive rivalry. As a side note, to draw another comparison with a film we watched recently, of Ushio's tracks for the soundtrack, "slt", sounds like it may have been inspired by Ryuichi Sakamoto's "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" from the 1983 film of the same name.
This Week
A Silent Voice (2016) is 2 hours, 10 minutes, so plan accordingly. It should be available to rent from the typical places.
This was my first time watching A Silent Voice, and I enjoyed it a lot. The group seemed to like it too. Personally I found the bullying in the elementary school flashbacks to be much harsher and difficult to watch, but I was impressed by the humanity and realism of it. After reading interviews with folks who worked on the film and hearing about how concerned they were with making Shōya seem like a real and relatable person despite his atrocious behavior, I think they really nailed this aspect of the film. Ushio's soundtrack was also great, and it's clear why he and Yamada have become such frequent collaborators.
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