This will be a spoiler free review. I hope you will be interested enough after reading my review to go watch this work of art.

From the outside A Silent Voice is an animated film about bullying among children, yet as soon as I began watching it, I could tell that this film is a work of art, made with great love and attention to detail on each level: narrative, visual, and musical. On the surface it is a movie about a boy who bullies a girl and later seeks redemption, but it is also about the walls we build between each other, and the ways that we can surpass those walls, often without speaking out loud.

The movie begins with a short scene where a young man contemplates suicide on a bridge. This is immediately followed by a montage of shorts showing the relationship between two middle schoolers: Shoya Ishida (a boy known as the class bully) and Shoko Nishimaya (a deaf girl transferring into Shoya’s class). Shoya swiftly begins making fun of Skoko, in smaller ways at first like mocking impressions, but soon he is openly cruel to her, stealing and destroying her hearing aids, mocking her incessantly, and laughing at her attempts to communicate and even become friends. These scenes are heart-wrenchingly painful to watch, and might lead you to believe the movie is centered on Shoko, the victim of the bullying, but then the movie cuts back to the present, and you realize that it is Shoya who has been considering suicide.

Shoya is a young man now, around 18, and he hates himself so deeply for what he did to Shoko that he has chosen to kill himself. On the day he picked out, he makes his rounds to try and pay back those who he has hurt in his life, before ending. This includes going to visit Shoko, whom he has not seen since she transferred out of his junior high to avoid his bullying. In his brief interaction with her, she asks him to feed fish with her on the upcoming tuesday. This small gesture is enough for Shoya to put off killing himself, at least for a few days.

From here we actually see what Shoya’s life is like now. Due to his reputation as a bully in middle school, he has been utterly cut off in high school. He has no friends, he is ridiculed and looked down on, he is utterly alone. When he walks through the halls at school he cannot even look his classmates in the eyes, which is expressed visually in the film by blue X marks over everyone’s face. There is a literal barrier between Shoya and most other people. However, there is not an X over Shoko’s face, and the opportunity for both reconciliation and healing that this small open-ness presents is enough to keep Shoya alive.

That is where the film really takes off narratively, and it is likewise where my mediocre summarizations come to an end. You’re welcome.

This is a movie that is hard to watch. There is a great deal of pain and suffering depicted in an extremely candid way. Yet every scene is gorgeously animated. The pastel colors and almost joyous style of the drawings are no accident. The hand drawn artwork forces you to keep your eyes on the screen in spite of how painful many scenes are to watch. Both Shoya and Shoko struggle against some of the most difficult things a person can face, and yet even when things look bleak, the beauty of the art itself gives you hope that something better is possible. I have seen many movie with dark themes that do an excellent job of expressing that darkness visually, but very few that can manage to express the same darkness and yet find beauty in it and through it like A Silent Voice does. Even when Shoya’s face is tormented with the loneliness and guilt that weighs on him, the beauty of the world around him is still present.

This might seem like it would be a contradiction narratively. The character is clearly suffering, but all is well with the world, but it is precisely this dynamic that makes the movie. As a viewer watching Shoya’s attempts to become a better man, and break down the walls between himself and others, you cannot help but root for him, because you can see that the world around him is abundantly beautiful. The walls he perceives are revealed (in large part by this contrast between him and the film’s depiction of the world around him) to be of his own making.

A Silent Voice does this sort of non-verbal storytelling both masterfully and intentionally. Like Shoko, who cannot speak or listen to others in a vocal way due to her hearing impairment, this movie finds new ways of speaking to its viewers without need of words. I watched the film in Japanese with English subtitles, but I almost felt as though I could watch the movie without the subtitle and have an equally powerful experience. In an era of film-making where dialogue is revered thanks to the masterful works of writers like Tarantino, Scorcese, and the Coen Brothers, A Silent Voice shows you just how much a movie can speak to you without words. It is a film that takes advantage of the fact that film contains multiple mediums. It speaks visually and musically just as much, if not more, than it does verbally.

Another striking example of visual communication is the way the film depicts Shoya’s perspective. When a scene is shown from Shoya’s eyes, the entire world is interpreted through his lens. One aspect of that is the X’s I mentioned earlier. When he looks at the world, he sees bodies without faces, it is almost as if there aren’t even other people around him. And yet a few times when someone does look at him and he meets their gaze, the screen erupts into gold and white light. The world fades away and Shoya has an almost beatific vision of the person who looks at him. For someone who feels truly alone like Shoya does, the simple kind gaze of another person is transcendent. That feeling is captured far better with the hand drawn impressionistic background than any dialogue could.

Not only does the film communicate visually, but it also speaks musically. The score composed by Kensuke Ushio is lush when it needs to be, but more often it is both gentle and introspective, putting the viewer in a serious and reflective state of mind without driving them down too far down into sadness. Like the contrast between Shoya’s expressions and the beauty of the background art, the music also dances the line between the weighty sorrow of the narrative and the resilient hopefulness that is necessary to survive the more somber moments.

In the quietest, most emotionally delicate moments the score is stripped down to a barely audible piano. You can hear both the static of the recording and even the sound of hands touching the keys and the performers slight shifts in posture. Deeply intimate moments narratively are met with the same intimacy musically. There is a sense of human presence in the music, a presence that dialogues with both the narrative and the viewer, gently guiding us, along with Shoya through some of the most painful experiences people can have.

A Silent Voice is a movie that speaks with a piercing clear voice, narratively, visually, and musically. Each of these aspects are in harmony with the other maintaining hope in the face of darkness, and ultimately serving beauty. The result is a film that wounds you and heals you at the same time, and remains with you long after the credits roll.