I went into this story with high expectations given the massive amounts of praise it's had lavished upon it like candy, and, well, spoiler alert; I ended up not really seeing what all the fuss was about. I don't outright hate the movie, but I didn't love it either like the vast majority of the anime community seem to do. I considered it to be just alright; nothing more than serviceable, at best. I was just going to leave it at that and never touch it again, but recently, some jerk twitter mutual of mine decided to give me crap about the sacrilegious crime of giving this alleged masterpiece an initial 6.5 out of 10 rating, so I figured I would go back to it with a rewatch to see if it renews or changes my perspective of the film and compartmentalize my thoughts in a review.

So, this is my review of the critically acclaimed A Silent Voice.

I'll start off with the positives or at least what I thought the film done right which likely attributed to its enormous fame. The movie opens up with main character Ishida Shouya tying up any remaining loose ends and paying off his remaining "debts," leaving an envelope beside a woman we could readily assume is his mother without the need for dialogue. I'll give credit where credit's due here; the movie does a stellar job at least showing instead of telling, a feat many an anime fail to accomplish. It could've just as easily began with an info-dump narration of Ishida just telling the viewers straight up, "This is my last day. I've tied up my loose ends to pass on to the next world without regrets, because a scumbag bully like me doesn't deserve to live."

The latter would've been far less powerful than the former. The former epitomizes Ishida's mood without feeling the need to force it in our faces. It just lets the scene play out in a melancholic montage and I can certainly imagine why this would immediately grab people's attention, especially if they've ever felt suicidal before.

Following the depressive intro, the movie takes a step back and flashes five years back into the past leading up to the events that transformed him into the sorry state he became for the rest of the story. We get a small montage of Ishida playing video games and roughhousing with his friends in an attempt to try and give him some characterization before he went full jerk mode; the trigger being our secondary main character, Nishimiya Shouko. The movie paints Ishida's realization upon learning Shouko's clinically deaf realistically. She's "different" so naturally he would look to single her out, especially in a homogeneous country like Japan where children are taught to blend in and be "normal".

Ishida's childish contempt for Shouko needs no explanation really, but the film does try and attempt to rationalize it as Shouko being "weird" in his eyes with less than stellar results.

Ishida then exhibits mass cruelty toward Shouko for his own twisted amusement. The next few minutes can be difficult to sit through, but I will give the story credit for not shying away from the realism of Ishida's cruel bullying, from tripping her up, shouting in her ear and discovering she has hearing aids when she flinched, then destroying those very hearing aids pair by pair, even ripping one pair out of her ears with so much force her ears bled.

It was a hard watch, but it did make his quick comeuppance all the more therapeutic. After Shouko's mama calls the school regarding her daughter's missing and broken hearing-aids, the sensei confronts Ishida about this in front of the entire class. The rest of the class instantly scapegoat him to rid themselves of any guilt even though they themselves did nothing to stop it. Even his one accomplice, Ueno, turned on him to escape the consequences of her actions.

Thus, Ishida found himself on the short end of the stick, being harshly bullied and ostracized by the very people he thought were his friends, transforming him into the emo, docile loser for the remainder of the movie. Karma is a cruel mistress, and this flashback exemplifies that old saying perfectly.

Certainly, I sympathise with fans resonating powerfully with Ishida's struggles for self-forgiveness as the years of isolation and scorn his own actions led him into, leaving him so scarred, he can no longer look strangers directly in the eye, imagining blue crosses around their faces; an artistic choice I found more distracting than anything else. There are some good moments, too. It would be disingenuous of me to not mention the endearing friendship he formed with Nagatsuka (who resembles a glorified Mineta from Boku no Hero Academia) when he sacrificed his bike so Nagatsuka wouldn't lose his to a thief. It was touching to see Nagatsuka go to great lengths in order to successfully recover Ishida's bike.

I've gone on length detailing my evaluation of what I thought fans of the series most likely fell in love with. I'll detail my own personal reasons of why I ultimately found the series to be a drag.

(Be warned, the following section contains my own opinions.)

The biggest reason has to be the characters themselves. I just didn't end up feeling anything for them. Oh, for sure, I understand why others would heavily resonate with Ishida's journey of redemption. I respect those viewpoints, but for me, I found the sympathy act to be so heavy-handed and forced with a backstory I considered ham-fisted, I grew almost immediately dismissive of his struggles and began to resent him. If I had to put this down to a specific reason, I would point toward my love of Naruto in its prime years. (This claim, in itself, is completely subjective, of course) I LOVED part one Naruto to death growing up and my attachment only grew more when he called bullshit on Inari's "woe is me" act. It was a powerful character defining moment that solidified my love for Naruto in part 1 and it helped Inari out of his emo phase.

Self-loathing is not a good thing and while I can somewhat appreciate the circumstances that led to Ishida's self-pity, it still doesn't make him likeable or even sympathetic. It doesn't help matters at all when he does little to improve his fragile mental health other than trying to essentially stalk Shouko. His mother should've made his mental health ten times worse in an utterly jarring scene where she harshly berated him for attempting to take his own life, threatening to burn all the money he poured his blood, sweat and tears into to pay her back for the hearing-aids she had to reimburse Shouko's mother for. It was such a reprehensible scene that angered me immensely.

This is NOT the way to go about treating someone's mental health. When you're suicidal, the very last thing you need is to be berated for being suicidal. Ultimately, all that's going to accomplish is worsening your condition. It'll just feel like it's your fault for being so down in the dumps. Ugh. My head was so hot from that scene, I had to pause the film and take a 10-minute break. Absolutely horrendous and it just solidified Ishida's mother as the worse character, even more when she stupidly ended up burning the money anyway. Dumb bitch.

This is symbolizes why I don't like A Silent Voice. At no point does Ishida ever try and seek help for his condition. He just ties up all his loose ends, pays off his debt, and attempts to kill himself before failing and aimlessly stumbling through the rest of the story with no plan in mind to treat his condition. He just "happens" to run into Shouko again. It would've resonated far more powerfully if instead of the happenstance of just randomly meeting Shouko, he runs into her by trying to assist the partially and clinically deaf like her, or maybe she could find him doing such community service. Seeing her former tormentor doing good like this would've made their eventual reconciliation much more believable.

Instead, we don't get that. We get him moping all the way through the end of the flashback where he instantly finds her and starts trying to awkwardly reconnect.

Nishimiya Shouko feels less like a character and more like a vessel to pull the story along in a specific direction, used solely as a device to force sympathy from the viewers. The movie makes the strange decision to exclude her internal thoughts she had in the manga. This, in turn, makes it very difficult to gauge her personality. She's comparable to a generic villain that thinks it's a real character because it has a dramatic, over-the-top sob story. Just... no. A character doesn't become well-rounded just because they have a sad, cheesy backstory. A character becomes a character when they're given actual relatable quirks, habits, interests, likes and dislikes. She would've been much more relatable and sympathetic just seeing her eat a specific sandwich she really enjoys than constantly apologizing all the time.

In the long run, it just made her a frustrating character rather than the intended sympathetic. When writing a character, you don't want to fall into the pit trap of making them overly sympathetic to the point of being pathetic. If that happens, you run the risk of turning the audience's sympathy into indifference. When I'm reviewing fanfiction with the writer's own original character starring as the main character, I always advise the author not to open up the chapter with a lengthy sob story regarding the OC just to force sympathy for their character.

The best way to form a connection with your character and the audience is to show your character just going about their daily lives, doing and experiencing things real life people might. This way, they will have related to them before being hit with their sad backstory. Their backstory will then naturally feel all the more tragic because the audience was given time to form an attachment.

Just cramming a sad sob story down our throats and making your character a walking vessel of melodrama isn't the way to do it, in my opinion.

Ueno Naoka - In my first watch, I hated her with a passion since she 1: never got what was coming to her and 2: never really learnt the errors of her ways, but on my second watch, I found she was actually spitting facts in more ways than one. I especially liked when she called out Sahara's cowardice and Kawai's hypocrisy during Ishida's breakdown scene. She was a 100% right. Sahara did nothing to stop her and Ishida from bullying Shouko and Kawai even laughed despite putting on the water works and scapegoating Ishida. While all this isn't enough to make me love her since she also scapegoated Ishida despite being his accomplice, I'm at least willing to award her brownie points to sticking to her sense of self and not bowing to peer pressure.

Ishida's mom - Just a dumb bitch all-round. Threatening her son and even jumped to the conclusion that her son was bothering Shouko again when he was badly hospitalized for her sake. Like, what? Why would that be her first thought? Ishida wasn't even remotely the same person when he risked his life to save Shouko. Ugh. Such a frustrating character.

Nishimiya Yuzuru - Yuzu was a great sister to Shouko. I love her.

Ishida Maria: Ishida's niece - Adorably precious and I like the added touch of Ishida's sister settling down with a Brazilian man for the culture.

Nagatsuka Tomohiro - A real bro

In conclusion.

Ishida went from a douchebag to an emo loser.

Shouko felt more like an empty vessel meant to pity than an actual character with personality

And while the side characters were serviceable, they were little more than that.

The characters are the bread and butter in any anime, which is especially true in a slice of life one. If I can't enjoy the characters, then naturally the anime is going to feel like a bore. A Silent Voice swings too far in one direction, thus diminishes the effect. Contrary to popular belief, too much of one thing is not a good thing. Example time! The series KONOHANA KITAN was so sweet sickly wholesome and fluffy that it ended up being cringey instead. A Silent Voice is so depressive that it ends up being frustrating.

With that said, I can't award A Silent Voice any more than a 5.7/10. I'm really sorry to those who felt touched by this movie and I definitely didn't mean to offend in anyway. I was just giving my honest opinion of what I thought on this highly acclaimed movie, and what I personally walk away is not the bittersweet melancholy the majority felt, but more anger and frustration because how heavy-handed the film treated Ishida's depression.

Regardless, though, this is all just one girl's humble opinion. I acknowledge its firmly in the small minority.