A Silent Voice Director was Forced to Move Away from the Original Manga to Make the Anime Adaptation More Presentable

SUMMARY

• A Silent Voice is a story that would make any anime fan cry, regardless of age or gender.
• Though the director made sure to keep the manga's spirit intact, she had to rearrange scenes to make sure the film flows naturally.
• The film does cut some background scenes and reduce the roles of certain characters, but fans love both the mediums of the series.

A Silent Voice is renowned for being one of anime’s most heartbreaking but realistic films of all time. No matter how dense one can be, fans cannot walk away without shedding a tear or two, especially after the dream sequence and the scene where Shoya returns to the school and finds out that his friends still care for him. The dynamic between him and Shoko will never be forgotten as long as the industry exists.

The story revolves around Shoko Nishimiya, a grade school student who has impaired hearing. She transfers to a new school, where she is bullied by her classmates, especially Shoya Ishida. It gets to the point where she transfers to another school and as a result, Shoya is ostracized and bullied himself, with no friends to speak to and no plans for the future, leading him to contemplate suicide. Years later, he decides to first make amends with those he has wronged before ending his life.

A Silent Voice‘s Director had no other choice but to change THIS from the manga

Shoya in A Silent Voice’s ending | Credits: Kyoto Animation

While the film is received pretty well from the fans, there’s no adaptation without changes being made to the original source material. And according to the director herself, there is a change that she wanted viewers to know. According to Director Naoko Yamada in an interview, she had to break the manga down and rearrange scenes to make sure the film flows in a seamless fashion while keeping the spirit intact.

If we didn’t rearrange it, then we wouldn’t be able to present the amount of energy and charm the original A Silent Voice manga had. It’d be too much. I thought about how to capture its soul while converting it into audiovisual media. Considering the love and respect I felt towards the manga, if I didn’t first deconstruct the material to actually remake it into a single film, then I couldn’t proudly and honestly say that I adapted it into anime. My resolve towards the work and its author was strong enough that the manga might as well have been the daughter whose hand I was asking for in marriage. I faced the production every day with that level of determination.

It’s pretty well known within the community that expressions in manga and anime work in different ways, so it’s the job of the director to get across to the staff how to make A Silent Voice convey its original charms through different means. In this case, the intent behind the characters and their thought process needs to be intact even when changes are made.

Key differences between A Silent Voice manga and anime

Miki and her boyfriend | Credits: Kyoto Animation

There are a lot of more things that were cut from the manga. For example, the manga suggests young Shoya is influenced by his never-properly-seen big sister, whose attitude is “Life is a war against boredom.” For his sister, that leads her to having endless boyfriends (thirty, allegedly!), before sticking with the Brazilian Pedro. For Shoya, it shapes his search for diversions, like jumping off bridges or picking on a deaf girl.

Other characters in the series are cut back heavily in the movie. For instance, the reason why Naoka bullied Shoya is because Naoka fancied Shoya and her scary possessiveness in elementary school is pointed out more elaborately in the manga. The story of Miki and her boyfriend was also cut off from the movie. In the manga, he has his own dark issues tied to bullying. However, Naoko Yamada says Satoshi’s story was cut because “I didn’t want a negative storyline like that to drag on in the film.”

The film’s final sequence, set at the school festival, comes from around the middle of book seven. In the last chapters of the manga, following the conclusion of the film, the protagonists contemplate their future after graduation. Shoko realizes she has the freedom to fly, and Shoya worries that she may no longer require his support. Both the film and the manga avoid answering the age-old topic of “what happens” to the characters. Having said that, the original manga by Yoshitoki Oima points clearly in one direction.

Despite the differences, fans of A Silent Voice still adore both mediums and that’s why they’ve given it a high rating of 8.93/10 on MyAnimeList.

A Silent Voice is available to watch on Crunchyroll.

Written by Anand Bhaskaran

Articles Published: 94

A Dragon Ball fanatic who also loves to read and talk about Indian spirituality. An MBA finance graduate with a passion for doing everything that is unrelated to it. Anand has over 4 years of experience under his belt, having worked with leading content heads in the anime community. Currently, he's more into Slice of Life and Romcom shows than actual Battle Shonen. But unfortunately, he's stuck with a job writing ONLY about Battle Shonen (smh).