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Koe no Katachi is a beautiful movie about a boy who mercilessly bullies a deaf girl in elementary school, only to have everything come to a head and then he gets mercilessly bullied in return, and must then redeem himself, not only in the eyes of his peers, but also in his own heart. The backgrounds, the music, the voice acting, the character design, everything just comes together to deliver a fantastic experience.

...Or so I would like to say, but Koe no Katachi is, like its characters, so incredibly riddled with flaws that it can be a complete turnoff. The kicker is it entirely lies ... in directorial decisions. Without spoiling too much, let me just say that, without ever having read the actual manga the movie was based on, I did not feel that the movie adequately expressed the meaning of the title. At multiple times during the movie, I ended up squirming in my seat thinking "When is this going to end?" During the credits roll, I felt completely disjointed, like, what did anything to do with, well anything? What's the message? Where's the payoff? There was an acute sense of disappointment as I left the theatre. It could have been so much more. But they blew it. The director blew it. KyoAni blew it. All that potential, just gone down the drain. That was the strongest emotion the movie got out of me.

The thing is, the rest of the movie is utterly brilliant. The art is amazing. The backgrounds are perfect. They're detailed, and they more than adequately express the moods of the movie. Despite Koe no Katachi being basically a lot of talking heads due to the nature of the source material, they've found a lot of ways to work in beautiful animation, and there are more than a few sequences where you can really see the animators going all out to express flowing, lifelike movement. It's such a high level of artistry that you could just get lost watching things move. The characters also look and feel a lot better than the competition, which really bumps it up a notch for me.

I'm not a stickler for sound, so I must say I did not pay very much attention to the sound. However, as a rule of thumb, if I don't notice the sound design, it probably means that nothing was jarring enough to actually take my attention away from the story proper. The OP, while not exactly a earworm, was thematically fitting for the movie, while the ED would have been amazingly relevant had the movie been actually about sound.

The most prominent thing about Koe no Katachi is how fucking raw it is. Like, if the movie was a steak, it would be trying to eat the salad. (Haha.) The movie takes the time to meander with the characters as they go about their lives. I feel like a lot of effort was put in to make sure that you get to know the characters, and by the end of the film, you'd know Shouko and Shouya inside and out. Yes, the flow of the movie makes no sense, but on a meta level it feels like it's mirroring the sort of turbulence that one feels in the troubled teenage years. Things just toss and tumble and you just kind of get what Shouko and Shouya are feeling, because you've been following right beside them for the entire movie. I think it really does a good job of getting you to invest emotions above all else (to the detriment of all else?).

This is complemented by the sheer brilliance of the voice acting. Irino's performance as Shoya really stands out. He captures that sense of social awkwardness perfectly, which is a herculean task in itself, and when he starts screaming and yelling, boy do the hairs on your skin start standing, because it feels like he's going to bust his lung to bring all that raw emotion out.

Hayami also delivers a splendid performance as Shouko. For a person who works in an industry that has so much to do with sound, it's amazing how she can replicate that feeling that she's deaf. Shouko doesn't get all that many lines, but Hayami makes every last one of them count. Shouko's speech is uneasy, awkward, and wobbles all over the place -- just like you'd expect it to because she doesn't even know how other people sound like! One scene in particular sticks out where Hayami does an absolutely gutwrenching rendition of the most frustrated incoherent noises I have ever heard. Putting aside their individual performances, their on-screen chemistry is almost palpable. They could not have found better voices to play the leads.

Even the other characters are voiced very well. Characters' speech just flows naturally and all the cast members have good chemistry. Kaneko Yuuki deserves a special mention for how she manages to play a standard tsundere character as the complete bitches they should be rather than any sort of endearing, given her general antagonistic role. The friend I watched the movie with ranted for 10 entire minutes about her character when we left the cinema -- which means she did her job well!

All in all, I strongly recommend the movie if you want to watch how a director can run a movie into the ground even with perfect art and animation. Alternatively, I would say that the movie can be quite the feels trip for those are emotionally sensitive and those who don't really care for plot in movies.

I watched this in Picadilly Shinjuku in Tokyo.