 A silent voice is a movie that I can only bear to watch so often, because of its realism. Koe no Katachi or A Silent Voice was created in 2016, directed by Naoko Yamada and written by Reko Yoshida. Due to the timing of the movie, its early days were spent in the shadow of your name or Kimi no Nawa. A movie that would become the highest grossing anime film of all time. Compared to the warmth and fantastical elements of your name, The Shape of Voice is a movie that is incredibly realistic and raw, in the way that it approaches mental health, suicide and bullying. And the two interlinked themes I want to look at are guilt and redemption. To understand why our characters are guilty, A Silent Voice spends the first 23 minutes of the movie breaking our protagonist Ishida Shoya down. Ishida and his youth, specifically the 6th grade, bullied our other protagonist Nishimiya Shoko because she was different, because she was deaf. And Ishida did it in the most detrimental ways. First by mocking her disability, insulting her, scaring her, and repeatedly ripping out the expensive hearing aids out of her ears. And finally physically fighting her. All Nishimiya wanted was a friend, but none of the kids were willing to listen or to try and understand that. It is an explanation for the very first two minutes of the film where he is shown selling his items. Ishida is planning to take his own life because of the actions of his past. One could say it's Ishida's way of escaping that feeling, of escaping the burden. As a final act Ishida was planning on returning the notebook he took from Nishimiya and their youth. However when Ishida sees Nishimiya after all these years, he sees her as her younger self, thereby illustrating that he has not yet moved past that point in his life. When he returns the notebook she asks him why he knows silent language. And the shame for what he had done forced him to learn how to communicate with her, to give her the notebook, and for them to be friends. And all of these acts happened within the first three minutes of the high school portion of the film, and Ishida's iniquity was the cause of this. This was framed perfectly because it doesn't seem genuine. It seems like he's not apologizing and trying to be friends for the sake of being friends, or to try and be a good person. But rather to sue this conscience before he left the world. And later we see that his punishment for the bullying that he performed in his youth was his social anxiety and his untrusting nature. Ishida lost every single friend that he had in elementary school. He cannot look people in the eyes anymore. He has too much shame and guilt. And when he makes his first new friend, Nagatsuka, he asks him about friendship and the requirements for it, where Nagatsuka answers that friendship defies logic and words. And this is where Ishida begins on his quest for redemption. To become what Nishimiya sought after since their youth. A friend. Ishida begins to spend time with Nishimiya. He reunites her with Sahara and some of their older classmates. And he also spends time with her family, most notably her little sister, Yuzuru. After a falling out with their classmates because of their behavior, Ishida begins to spend all of his time with Shoko and Yuzuru, even mending the relationship between their mother and Ishida. Following this, the three of them attend the fireworks, where after a while, Nishimiya steps away and is later found by Ishida, trying to jump off the ledge of their home, trying to commit suicide. And as Ishida catches her, saving her life, he nearly throws his own away as he plummets into a nearby river. And all this time, Nishimiya was dealing with the guilt of her own. And her conversation with Ueno on the rollercoaster highlighted this. Ueno specifically mentions how she always apologizes for everything. And then Nishimiya says this. Since her youth, she has felt as though she was a burden for other people, because she was different. Nishimiya felt that because she was deaf, it made life harder for everyone around her, which is why she is so apologetic for everything, especially things that are not her fault. She apologizes for her own existence. And this is hinted at even earlier, when Nishimiya changes her hairstyle and tries speaking instead of using sign language, because she didn't want to feel like she was slowing other people down anymore, to the point where she tried to take her own life. And looking back at that scene, when Ishida was holding her hand on that ledge, it holds such weight, because he says, the entire movie was predicated on not running away from his guilt. Now with this girl's life in his hands, he understands that this is the price he has to pay for what he had done. This is punishment for his sins. That after this, he has no choice but to face life head on, to look people in the eyes, to look at his own guilt in the eyes, because of this girl who felt that she was a burden to this world, and she hid that with a smile, a feeling that he once felt. Ishida and Nishimiya are linked because of this guilt that they have both experienced, and he feels indebted to her because he contributed to her pain. She knows what it feels like to not want to live with that weight anymore, and these two characters aren't the only ones who have an encounter with guilt. When Sahara and Ishida are on the roller coaster, her guilt is put on display, she calls herself a coward, and Ishida echoes this at the park during their group argument. The one character who was friends with Nishimiya and her youth transferred as soon as Nishimiya started getting bullied. She ran away, so she too holds that shame. Ishida's mother feels guilty for her son's actions towards Nishimiya at the beginning of the film, and Nishimiya's mother and Yuzuru both show self-condemnation when they see Ishida's mother at the hospital, and Nishimiya shows guilt for Ishida's injury when she falls at Ishida's mother's feet. While the entire movie is spent following Ishida's path at redemption, him risking his life to save Nishimiya redeemed himself, and Nishimiya going to see everyone that Ishida once spoke to is her redemption. As she says she wants to fix what she destroyed. And with this one line, Ishida recapitulates the theme of the film. A silent voice teaches that guilt cannot be erased without redemption, and without forgiveness. Guilt must be owned, you must own up to what you have done, and you must redeem yourself. Ishida did some terrible things to Nishimiya, and he paid the price. He wasn't able to look people in the eyes to live confidently. Nishimiya owned up to his guilt, and he redeemed himself by saving Nishimiya from her own demons. And finally, forgiveness. Forgiveness must first begin with oneself. If you are truly sorry for your actions, you can forgive yourself. Nishimiya had already forgiven Ishida for what he had done, but he hadn't forgiven himself. And once all these steps were completed, the burden was finally removed. And now Ishida and Nishimiya, the guilt-ridden duo's purpose, is to help each other grow. To help each other with their forgiveness, and to help each other embrace reality. To help each other live, with confidence and with acceptance.