Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		5.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

A Silent Voice Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson July 18, 2020

Director Naoko Yamada is one of the rising stars at Kyoto Animation, with Liz and the Blue Bird (2018) as well as the K-On! and Tamako Market series and movie adaptations to her credit. In adapting Yoshitoki Oima's seven-volume manga, Koe No Katachi (The Shape of the Voice), her multi-storied A Silent Voice tackles the themes of bullying, sympathy, forgiveness, and compassion with startling beauty. At an elementary school in the small city of Ōgaki, Shoko Nishimiya (voiced by Saori Hayami), a deaf girl, doesn't have trouble making new friends but the popular Ishida Shoya (voiced first by Miyu Irino, and later Mayu Matsuoka), stands in her way as the class bully. Shoya finds Shoko's personality peculiar and the fact that she can't hear strange to him. So he begins teasing her even though she tries to be nice to him. Shoya then throws Shoko's expensive hearing aids away and tosses her notebook (so crucial to communicating with others who aren't proficient in JSL) into the pond. While Shoya's friends more or less condone his antics, they eventually ostracize him from the group. Shoya sinks into a depression and nearly takes his own life.

Naoko flashes forward over five years when Shoko has changed schools. Shoya tries to redeem himself by visiting her after school but Shoko's tomboyish sister Yuzuru (Aoi Yuki) either tells him she's not available or doesn't want to see him. When he finally gets to see her, Shoya displays kindness by bringing her bread that he's bought and holding his umbrella over Shoko during a rainstorm. But Shoko reminds him that's he going to have to work harder in order to demonstrate full repentance and earn her forgiveness. It doesn't help Shoko's cause that he's befriended by Tomohiro (Kensho Ono), a corpulent and loud guy who interferes in Shoko and Yuzuru sibling affairs as well as Shoko's business. Also detrimental is Shoko's association with Shoko's foe, Naoka Ueno (Yuki Kaneko).

Yoshitoki Oima illustrated an array of many characters throughout his seven-part manga series, which presented a big challenge to Naoko and her screenwriter Reiko Yoshida. The narrative structure employs flashforwards and flashbacks which can be tricky to follow at times but since the characters are so richly developed, the viewer can piece together the disparate time elements and place where they fit properly in the puzzle. Both Shoya's mother and Shoko's mother look at Shoya with disregard and contempt, which makes Shoko an outcast to family kin to go with his outsider status in middle school. A Silent Voice is gorgeously animated but because the filmmakers try to be so faithful to the original source material, they've crammed in several additional secondary characters, which makes the movie stuffy and a little long at 130 minutes.

A Silent Voice Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Shout! Studios has released A Silent Voice as a Blu-ray + DVD combo pack that comes with a slipcover. The film appears in its originally composited ratio of 1.85:1 on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-50. I noticed very few flaws in the source print as this is a near reference-quality anime transfer. The picture has an almost 3D look to it. The use of dappled light is exquisite and the lens flares are equally impressive. Shout! has encoded the feature at a mean video bitrate of 35000 kbps.

The two-hour, ten-minute feature receives the usual twelve scene selections.

A Silent Voice Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shout! supplies the original Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround (3316 kbps, 24-bit) and a dubbed English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix (3564 kbps, 24-bit). I concentrated primarily on the Japanese language track which sometimes goes a wee-bit too fast in order to read all the English subtitles. Composer Kensuke Ushio utilizes piano in soft and subtle ways but also raises it to crescendos, which bring the surround channels to life. The alternate track uses a cast of English voice actors, including a deaf person to add to the realism of Shoko's character.

The optional white English subtitles are clear and legible.

A Silent Voice Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theme Song Music Video (3:50, 1080p) - performed by AIKO.

• Speed of Youth Music Video by Naoko Yamada (1:54, 1080p) - an instrumental underscore that accompanies scenes of bike riding.

• Original Japanese Promotional Videos and Trailers (5:58, 1080p) - the first set of promos are not subtitled but the last two trailers contain English subs.

A Silent Voice Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A Silent Voice is a beautifully composed anime that never gets overly sentimental or schmaltzy. The kids and later teens are complexly portrayed and well-developed, although the movie tries to fit in too many characters. I didn't see any black crush or digital macroblocking that plagued UK-based All the Anime's Blu-ray release compared to Shout! Studio's clean transfer. Supplements are limited to only music videos and trailers so if you want English-subtitled interviews with the filmmakers, you'll want to buy the British edition. Japan's Pony Canyon Limited Edition also contains an audio commentary and making-of doc that aren't subtitled. Despite not having bells and whistles, the Shout! package comes STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.