How A Silent Voice changed my life - a salute to Kyoto Animation

Written by The Curmudgeon

In 2017 I watched a film for the first time which perfectly embodied my experience with depression. The story and themes captured not just the symptoms of my personal depression, but also a cause. It so succinctly sliced through the confusing bullshit of my mind. It cracked a code.

I’m talking about A Silent Voice (2016). I feel indebted to this movie because it somehow found a way to explain my depression better than I ever could. It gave me words when there were none. It made depression feel like a less lonely place, perhaps just because I had something to compare myself to.

I’d like to delve into how the film affected me and how I read into it personally. This is not a review, nor is it an exhaustive essay claiming to understand what the film is ‘about’, per se. This is simply my own take on a film which affected me in a totally idiosyncratic way.

And, as always…spoilers ahead.

A Silent Voice revolves around two kids: a young boy, Shôya – class clown, brutish, and mostly unlikable; and Shoko, the new girl in school – sweet, unassuming, and deaf. In a typical case of othering, Shôya hones in on her deafness and bullies her like crazy. What begins as rejection quickly evolves into torment, which grows into violent and abhorrent behaviour. He makes her life hell, to the point that she eventually caves and moves school. The rest of the class, recognising Shôya’s unambiguous fault in this, turns on him. The bully becomes the bullied.

Fast-forward to the high school years, and Shôya’s tyrannical antics have long since been drained out of him. He’s kinder, quieter, but irrevocably depressed. Years of bullying and guilt have carved him into the very picture of misery. He plans to kill himself, and the only loose end left is Shoko, the girl with whom he never made amends. He meets her anew and the two become unlikely allies.

What follows is a sort of case study into the two kids’ lives; a window into the depression of a couple of teenagers who haven’t quite figured themselves out just yet.

In my eyes, this isn’t a story about guilt. It’s not even a story about redemption, although redemption certainly plays into the plot to no small degree. I think that YouTube channel Under The Scope nailed it in saying it's a story about communication (link here). While their video details sound, visuals, and physical idiosyncrasy, I'd like to expand on how it relates to the characters' depression, thus, why it's personal to me.

You needn’t look closely to see that the protagonists' strife is rooted in communicating. Shoko struggles to communicate in a literal way; her deafness makes it difficult to understand others, and the barrier of sign language makes it difficult for her to be understood. Early in the film, for instance, when she signs “you, me, friends” to Shôya as an attempt to call a truce. His total obliviousness leaves her offer of friendship in the dirt, resulting in yet more unnecessary anger and othering. Shoko’s misery is tangible, and it seems to stem from this inability to communicate – to understand or be understood.

Her social skills become stilted as a consequence, resulting in a limited bubble of friends and family who know and comprehend her. This becomes painfully apparent when Shoko begins to develop feelings for her antagonist-turned-ally. She wants to confess, she must. But she cannot, for she doesn’t know how. She buys him some vague garden ornaments – a sweet gift and an extremely endearing display of social ineptitude – but nonetheless, the total randomness of the present reduces the act of gift-giving to something purely ritualistic. She isn’t giving him something relevant to him, or something he’d necessarily want. She’s giving him something purely to give him something, because that’s the thing to do when you tell someone you like them. The most upsetting part of this sequence is that her speaking voice is incomprehensible to Shôya, thus her attempts to say “I love you” are totally fruitless. Her confession falls on deaf ears; misunderstood, cast to the wind.

Consequently, her difficulty in communicating with those around her turns inwardly in an aggressive bout of self-loathing. When an old school adversary claims “I still hate you, and you hate me, too”, her response is: “I don’t hate you, I hate myself”.

The manner with which communication factors into Shôya’s mental health is a little different. He isn’t deaf, and thus his inability to communicate doesn’t manifest itself so literally. It’s more like years of social ostracism have caused him to wilfully isolate himself from the people around him out of fear.

He becomes a pastiche of himself, his daily life painted monotonous by sheer loneliness. When he’s at school, everyone around him is obscured by big blue crosses, a manner of visually depicting his disconnection from society. On the odd occasion the perspective shifts to Shôya’s POV, he routinely avoids eye-contact, or the sound muffles into white noise. He looks without seeing, hears without listening. He lives in his own little bubble, populated by his frequent propensity for internal monologuing. All of this is to say that Shôya is demonstrably introverted and insular. Unlike Shoko, Shôya chooses not to talk to people, motivated by the looming pressure of his past transgressions and the vitriolic backlash which followed. When he forces himself to talk, his words become devoid of substance and sincerity.

It’s only natural, then, that Shôya’s mental state improves drastically as he develops the confidence to open himself up to the world. It starts small – his first connection is a classmate, Tomohiro, a nerdy social reject who makes a conscious effort to reach out to him after Shôya discreetly attempts to defend him from bullies. Little by little, Shôya’s web of connections expands, and the obtrusive blue crosses fall from people’s faces. The world becomes a less lonesome place, a revelation which he expresses internally – “is it okay for me to have this much fun? It’s like we’re friends”. This is why it’s important that, in the climax of the story, Shôya allows himself to see and to listen. He finally opens himself up to the people around him, symbolised by the visual metaphor of Shôya lifting his hands off his ears, every blue cross falling to the ground in a triumphant conclusion.

This is exactly why this movie affected me on such a personal level. I, too, had (and perhaps still have) the tendency to shut the world out. I, too, have a history of struggling to communicate and form those much-needed connections with the world. This is an epiphany I likely wouldn’t have had so soon had I not watched A Silent Voice. It helped me to realise that I’d spent far too long festering in my own depressive misery. I identified with Shoko’s intense frustration at her inability to voice her feelings as much as I identified with Shôya’s fear of human connection.

But why am I saying this now?

As many of you are probably (hopefully) aware, the studio which produced A Silent Voice – Kyoto Animation - suffered a horrendous arson attack resulting in the death of 34 people. 34 people who brought movies and TV shows like A Silent Voice to life. 34 people who left their thumbprint on the history of cinema. 34 people who had an effect greater than themselves.

I know I’m not the only one who watched one of their beautiful creations and felt that same humanistic connection to the stories they told. It’s truly rare to find a group of creators so capable of producing that effect. In the same way that A Silent Voice helped me to understand myself and my depression better, I have no doubt that there are millions of people who underwent a similar journey, hand in hand with any number of KyoAni’s enchanting conceptions.

Work like this cannot be undervalued. In a world where so much of what gets made is honestly quite poor, the slim exception just got a whole lot slimmer.

If you have any interest in supporting KyoAni, here’s a link to a currently ongoing GoFundMe campaign. And, if there’s nothing else you take away from reading this; watch the content they’ve produced. You won’t regret it.