A Silent Voice: The Movie

Naoko Yamada’s film comes from a comic that struggled to get printed at all. Yoshitoki Ōima’s one shot reached a magazine only in February 2011, after months of legal wrangling, and the serialisation was reviewed and supported by the Japanese Federation of the Deaf. Seven volumes were compressed into one film. A supervisor was hired for the sign language; Yamada says the meaning, the reasoning and the look of every sign was checked from pre production through post production. The crosses over the faces Shoya cannot meet were added afterwards: animators drew those faces in full, then the compositing team laid the marks on top. Yamada watches hands, feet and posture rather than faces, avoiding the overworked close up anime reaches for. Kensuke Ushio treated silence as material and put a microphone inside a piano for a muffled tone. The Japan Academy gave it the excellence award in animation, while the year’s top animation prize went to In This Corner of the World. Suicidal thinking is handled directly; Yamada says she meant to face the subject with integrity. A good fit if you want a camera on hands and feet instead of faces, and silence doing as much work as music. Not for anyone coming to it as a story about bullying, since Yamada says bullying is not the theme.