Koe no Katachi review

Animewolfguy7
Apr 16, 2021
I went into A Silent Voice with an attitude of equal parts interest and trepidation. Interest because of the high praise I had heard for the manga, and trepidation because the subject matter of childhood bullying seemed ripe for disaster. There are a million ways to make a story about bullying into a preachy PSA or a melodramatic angsty train wreck. What I ended up getting was a marvellously written story that completely shattered my fears that this manga was going to paint by numbers or take the easy way out.



STORY

If there's one archetype I'm an incurable sucker for, it's 'The Atoner'. A high school boy tries to make ammends to the girl he bullied in 6th grade, but also needs to learn to forgive himself and others. A Silent Voice covers the subject of bullying from multiple angles, covering not just the main victim and main bully, but also delving into how bullying can affect large groups even if only a handful of people are directly involved.

As for the actual sequence of events that make up the plot, those are fairly simplistic and straightforward. The plot focuses more on simply putting characters into normal situations and letting them go to work, rather than than creating grand setpieces or throwing lots of curveballs from out of the blue for the cast to react to. It has a couple moments of perhaps excessive drama, where emotion seems ramped up for the sake of 'feels' rather than logical progression. But overall the story is solid.



ART



Excellent background work is the best part of this series' art, with strong character designs to boot. For a series so heavily grounded in realism, it was critical to sell the idea that the story is taking place in the real world. To help sell this idea, A Silent Voice has highly detailed, beautiful backgrounds and settings that are practically reference photos. Combine this with character designs that are clearly distict and have a healthy dose of realism mixed in with the traditional manga aesthetic (body types, faces, and outfits are all fully within the realm of believeability) and it becomes very easy to believe you're seeing something that could happen in real life- which helps the emotional moments hit home. The layout and design of this series very straightfoward, with few gimmicks or tricks in the presentation.



CHARACTERS



This series should be required reading for anyone who wants to know how to make a character sympathetic even while they're not always or even often likable. Characters don't always fall into common tropes, and sometimes it can even take a couple re-readings to decide what you truly feel about a character. It would have been so easy to write this story with a Mary Sue or two for leads, surrounded by nasty bad guys who are just mean for the sake of being mean. The most admirable characters can sometimes make big mistakes and reveal major personal flaws, and the least likable pain-in-the-butt characters can sometimes show positive traits and do a good deed, and in neither case does it feel like a Deus Ex Machina because the writer took the time to properly flesh the cast out.



There are a couple flaws in this area however. In the middle a story a new character appears who is treated like they're super important and have always been there, despite never having been seen or shown affecting the plot in any way. And then just a chapter or two later, that same 'super important' character leaves the story and isn't referenced again. So there are flaws if you take a good look, but dang if the character writing isn't still strong.



OVERALL



An excellent manga, hands down. I give this series a very strong recommendation, a real 'must read' for someone looking for a serious emotional story.
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Koe no Katachi
Koe no Katachi
Auteur Ooima, Yoshitoki
Artiste