A Silent Voice: The Movie

Honestly my favourite film in existence right now.

Daughter loved it.

This is such a good one to watch. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the occasional anime movie. This one made me cry - I'm pregnant and hormonal and I'd use that as my excuse but it's just such a good and heart throbbing movie to watch.

I was looking forward to this movie since it was announced and waiting for it in the final months was aggravating to say the least! The story of boy reconciling with a deaf girl whom he bullied and finding love in the process was an endearing tale to the end.Arguably this film falls into the romance category but its romantic really to the extent a lot of quote-un-quote romance anime are, mostly about the building of a relationship emotionally more so than physically, even with Shoko’s love confession to Shoya. It defiantly has the elements of many coming-of-age stories of this nature, especially boy-meets-girl stories but the ultimate focus is a story of redemption and forgiveness.The Japan voice cast is an all-star knock out! Miyu Irino always has shown great acting ability and he really shines here as Shoya really able to express the burden of guilt he feels for the way he treated Shoko. Saori Hayami though give the woman a medal because of how amazing she does with Shoko. Given Shoko is deaf her speech patterns reflect this, she can’t communicate clearly with her own voice and she’s really able to capture that in her performance. Even her subtle moans and grunts and her speech. The awkwardly funny scene where she tries to convey her love for Shoya, it’s really well conveyed. I haven't heard the show in English yet, as a dub fan I have high hopes with it being from NYAV who also dubbed Your Name.I like the tone of the film is consistent; it’s serious pretty much start to finish but there are moments of levity that keep it from getting too bogged down in the drama. It’s refreshing, I find a lot of dramatic anime often are mixed with a lot of comedy or are so heavy on the drama or of course are set in the backdrops of other genres, which isn’t always a bad thing, it’s just nice for a change to have some consistency and just be ordinary but not come across as mundane either which is what some slice-of-life anime fall into if not careful.And of course the film is beautiful to look at with Kyoto Animation's dazzling visiuals and Naoko Yamada's wonderful directing.

As someone who generally watches anime in Japanese and subtitled in English, I'm often hesitant to even bother listening to the English dubbed voice tracks on Blu-ray copies. I could count on one hand the amount of times the English language voices have been even comparable to the sound of the Japanese ones, A Silent Voice not only can be counted alongside those, but I believe it's one of the finest examples of English dubbed anime around at the moment. Every voice actor delivers their lines in a way that makes them sound far closer to how English-language characters would actually speak than any other example I can think of in (English voiced) Anime.On top of this, the anime is easily in my top 10 of all time, though I may be a little biased on that due to owning all 7 volumes of the manga. This anime adaptation is well-paced compared to the source material and leaves out only the parts that slow the manga down. It would've been nice to see the final 3 chapters animated but I completely understand why they were not and it doesn't take away from the movie at all (after all, the source material still exists if you want to know what happens after the credits roll).I won't go in depth on the elements of the story since I'm sure other reviewers have that covered, suffice to say you likely won't be disappointed by this one if you decide to watch it in English - unless you're naturally biased against English-voiced anime, in which case I don't really know why you would try watching in English in the first place.