声の形 Koe no Katachi (The Shape of Voice)

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Iggy and I went to catch 声の形 Koe no Katachi (The Shape of Voice) yesterday at Vivo. Despite my heightened expectations stemming from ratings and reviews from friends who've already watched it, the show didn't disappoint - in fact I do want to watch it a second time just to appreciate some of the scenes I might have missed out on in detail.

Koe no Katachi is a slice of life, motivational kind of movie with spring vibes (think soft, bright colours and tones) that focuses on the idea of bullying. Some related themes include how one's experiences in the past still affects them even up to the present, and how one decides to change from their haunted past. 

The main protagonist, Ishida Shōya, had led his elementary school class in bullying his deaf classmate, Nishimiya Shōko, and eventually caused her to transfer schools. When the school decided to crack down on the case, Ishida was singled out as a scapegoat responsible for all the class' bullying, causing him to be ostracised and bullied in turn. The severe bullying he experienced led him to become an introverted individual with a fear of or distrust in making friends, believing that they viewed him negatively as well. He becomes overcome with thoughts of suicide and decides to find Nishimiya to apologise to her before killing himself, only to forget about his suicidal intentions when he interacts with Nishimiya for the first time with the sign language he had been learning. He then decides that instead of dying, his motivation for living now would be to make amends for all the trouble and suffering he made Nishimiya go through. During this process of helping Nishimiya, Ishida also has to confront his own insecurity around people as he encounters old friends from the past and new friends.

When we stepped out of the theatre, my first question to Iggy was "Between Kimi no Na wa and this, which do you like better?" While he preferred the former, he said he did enjoy the Koe no Katachi as well, just that he was left puzzled over certain gaps and unexplained plot progressions throughout the movie. The show indeed had many scenes that were glossed over before moving on to the next, and isn't as solid or complete as Kimi no Na wa - however, I felt that it didn't impede the flow of the show. A reason for the gaps could be that Koe no Katachi is actually a manga series with 7 volumes (62 chapters) - hence it is actually a challenge for the film's script writers to extract the important parts and then string them in a coherent and consistent storyline. In fact, I realised they had to modify some of the scenes to suit the film, after noticing several differences between the film and the manga which I'm now reading.

I personally prefer Koe no Katachi over Kimi no Na wa, since the themes in the former are more relatable than the latter which identifies as a more supernatural, fantasy-like genre. Even though everyone was raving about how tear-inducing Kimi no Na wa was, I didn't cry at all because I was too busy being amazed at Makoto Shinkai's art - but for Koe no Katachi, I felt my heart being wrenched and my eyes stinging at some of the more emotional scenes, so score one for Koe no Katachi. 

I liked most of the characters as well, though the film couldn't expand on all of them due to time limits. My favourite character is probably Yuzuru, Nishimiya's younger sister, who's a strong girl fiercely protective of her older sister. She experienced bullying because of the fact that her sister is deaf, and stopped going to school, accompanying Nishimiya mostly to her sign language classes. Knowing that her older sister had suicidal thoughts, Yuzuru took and put up photographs of dead animals she found at home in order to scare Nishimiya away from such thoughts. From the manga (not in the film), Yuzuru sports a boy's hair cut, because when their mother wanted to chop off Nishimiya's hair into a boy's cut in order to make her stronger like a boy against her wishes, Yuzuru picked up a pair of scissors and began to cut off her long hair, shocking their mother - presumably as a declaration that she would be the strong one for her sister.

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I loved how the show made me question the motivations for what the characters and generally people do. When faced with the existence of a traumatic past or experience from a certain period of your life, there are many things we do. Some of us carry it with us as a scar that threatens the way we live our lives now, limiting ourselves. Some of us run away and feign ignorance by trying to build a new life, a new self. Some of us hold a grudge against something or someone whom we believe to have caused our trauma. Some of us might be haunted by what we could have or should have done to prevent that past. Or all of them. But what's important is that we find ourselves dissatisfied with being stuck or held back by our past, and eventually confronting it in order to move on in life.