Kimi no Koe wo Todoketai

Kimi no Koe really is a Family-Friendly 'slice of life' style movie, It's slow and not much happens on the surface but everything is subtle. Nuance is difficult to do well in general, but Kimi no Koe does it well.

Story (8): Similar to relationships in real life you have to look under the surface to figure out why things happen, not everything is spoon fed. The premise of Kimi no Koe is a girl who believes in the power of words and the journey that belief takes her on, how her words impact the people around her and help her find herself. The main conflict ... of the movie is established very early but it is elusive to the viewer until the end, it's a great feeling and a sign of good writing to be able to look back and understand, rather than being guided through like a child. The biggest flaw with the story IMO is the physical depiction of 'kotodama' and an overly utopian ending. Otherwise it is a well balanced, very realistic story, everything has a reason and its not so obvious, it's not the most compelling story but it really is a beautiful message.

Art (10): I have watched a lot of anime with good art, but this is the first one where I have felt the need to stop and say to myself "Wow, this looks really good". Seriously the art is not unrealistically embellished, environments looks genuinely realistic and beautiful, like I wish I could be here. The level of detail in the scenes and the art direction is so good that it brings the whole town to life. no detail is spared, there are vehicles always whizzing by even in conversation, none of the background characters are blurs or clones, and every shop has it's own style that really, to a level I didn't think possible, brings everything to life.

Sound (7): I didn't notice anything special about the sound, It is good, well timed and well composed. It is about what I would expect for a movie like this from a studio of this size, no specific complaints from me.

Characters (8): The characters are incredibly true to life. They really are Highschool girls, and they act like it, they get easily attached to things and hold on to grudges they probably shouldn't, but they are all very distinctive. For me this is a positive, there are plenty of extraordinary characters in anime and we should give some love to more normal people, for others this is boring and pedantic. Their biggest flaw is that we don't get to know them enough, though they only have 90 minutes so its somewhat forgivable, madhouse introduces 7 main characters but most of them are only briefly touched upon, everything necessary is described but it is difficult to form a bond with a character you know so little about, but they do avoid taking the cliched shortcut to emotional bonds that every anime does, that is MOE, that's right there is no MOE in this movie and its such a welcomed relief, to show off a girl's lacrosse team without focusing on their thighs or chest, waitresses that aren't dressed like "working girls" and no kawaii suggestive poses. It's nice to see that it is possible for an anime about girls to focus more on their lives than their looks and it's very empowering to women.

Enjoyment (8): I find that you have to be in the mood to enjoy a slice of life anime, this is great after a long stressful or exciting day to unwind. I like to be open to all genres and coming from an action-loving background this movie really does slice of life well and allows me to appreciate the normal issues people face that don't always involve the fate of the world, instead involve the fate of a single girl, but when you think about it those two are the same things.

The fate of Nagisa is the fate of a world, HER world... the fact that she found her calling saved a world, and she made friends and helped people along the way, in the end that's all any of us can hope for and there's beauty in that. "To save one person is to save the whole planet"

One of the things that can really tackle down my enjoyment of an anime is when it present itself in an original matter, but falls into the classic pattern of it's own genre once it actually starts. Kimi no Koe wo Todoketai is also one of those cases. A well made slice of life movie, pushed down by it's unability to make itself different.

But let's start from the scratch. I was really looking forward to seeing this after reading the synopsis, which seemed a bit inovative compared to all other slice of lifes. I expected a story about how broadcasting can change lives of a ... lot of people and I thought the movie is gonna focus on the bigger picture. In this case, on all the people that can get to listen to our main heroine's voice. Did that happen? Sadly not.

The movie itself starts off almost the same way as every nowadays movie does. It's end of the year, summer vacation are coming and our presented friends are planning on what to do. However, on her way home, Nagisa, our main heroine, stumbles upon an abandoned café. She tries to explore it and finds an old radio station. She can't resist and makes her very first broadcast. Sadly, that's where things start going down.

Not down in the matter of quality, but in the matter of how is the story presented. Until now, even if only in details, a lot of things seemed a bit original compared to others. The girls are playing lacrosse, Nagisa does a lot of personal things like shouting her problems into a ringing bell and, of course, the plot is about broadcasting. Honestly, was this idea ever even used as a main plot device? Even if yes, you can't but say that it sounds interesting.

However, what the movie does is, instead of focusing on the broadcasting itself, it goes down to the classic cute girls slice of life. Nagisa is maybe the main heroine, but in about the third of the movie, membership of the "radio club" suddenly jumps up from two to six. And with that, the plot losses a lot of it's originality. It doesn't feel like something impactful anymore, it seriously feels like just another school club setup, which wasn't the case early on, and shouldn't have been the case even later on, if you ask me.

The characters themselves, while having decent chemistry, act in a very generic matter. We have the maid-like girl who serves café and says dumb things. We have the Tsunderish aggresive type that always wants to compete with her childhood friend even though she's better at everything. Then there's the obsessive girl, and the always calm one. You see, I don't tend to brag about originality all that often. However, this movie really doesn't do a very good job at making characters diverse. Or original, for this matter.

A big problem that relates with the characters not being top-notch comes up when they want you to feel for them. Actually, talking about emotions, the whole movie doesn't do a particulary good job at making you care when it matters. For the most part, it's pacing is quite good. However, there are about two or three moments which drastically change the set tone just in order to make the characters shed some tears. Not only these moments feel indredibly forced, it also damages the impact of the last minutes, which, looking from todays perspective, was the only time tears were supposed to pour.

Also, while it's almost a necessity to end up a slice of life in a happy matter, this whole movie was one of the most straight-forward I've ever had the pleasure of seeing. That in itself isn't really that big of a problem. However, I have a hard time not critisising the movie for it's predictability when I could literally picture the ending scene 10 minutes after it all started.

Art is, on the other hand, an area in which the movie pleasantly suprised me. Every scene looks very clean, polished, some of the background shots were borderline beautiful. Even moments that tend to be very sloppy, like bike riding, were animated in a respectful manner and added to the fact that is all is very nice to look at. Sound was OK.

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I took this review from the negative side of things more often than not, but please, don't let it mislead you! Kimi no Koe wo Todoketai is definetly not a bad movie. Just a one that ended up a bit bellow my expectations. And that has to affect my rating in one way or another, no matter how much I wanted to love it.

'Your Voice' is clearly Madhouse's attempt on creating something as succefull as 'Kimi no Na Wa' and 'Koe no Katachi'. Your Name + A Silect Voice = Your Voice. Like dude, could you be any more obvious? Unfortunately, they even failed to impress the audience who typically likes this type of drama.

Kimikoe is what I call a slice of life mess. It's a 90 minutes long life story which simply said contains too much, yet doesn't really even know what it is supposed to be about.

Nagisa, our main character is apparently a lacrosse player. If you don't know what lacrosse is, it is ... a sport which is practically the combination of softball and floorball which is played outdoors on a field similar to american football. This, like pretty much everything else in the movie, is completely irrelevant. The writing is on real thin ice. It's fairly similar to 'Sora yori mo Tooi Basho' except there is no adventure in this one. Apparently, all of this is just an excuse anyway because the only real purpose why this movie exists is the drama.

Nagisa seems to be some sort of emotionally unstable girl whose past story doesn't give us much more info about her other than she used to cry as a child and misses her grandma, and all sort of non- butterfly-and-rainbows level stuff happens to her until she finds out what real friendship is. It's quite hard to find any sort of emotional connection to her and what she is "going through" simply because she randomly goes to random places and random things occur without there being any sense to any of it nor any single believable reason for her to do anything she is doing. The storytelling is presented in a way where viewers just randomly discover new factors that pop out, assumably the actual story was written similarly. Just random ideas thrown here and there because they wanted this movie to be "something more" but really it just became "less".

Production-wise, this movie doesn't achieve much. When it comes to the art and sounds, the character design distantly reminds me of 'Hourou Musuko' which is the nro 1 reason why I even watched this movie. The seiyuu cast contains some big names, but Nagisa herself is casted by someone whose crying scenes and acting convey zero emotions and zero characteristics. Outside this, there isn't anything worth of noting.

As a conclusion, I didn't especially enjoy watching this movie. It was just very dull and felt both: pointless and amateurish. The fans of 'Sora yori mo Tooi Basho' might stll find it worth of their time because they are rather similar overall and made by Madhouse.