Hearing Impairment and A Silent Voice

A Silent Voice is one of my favorite movies in the entire world. It would be a serious contender if I absolutely had to pick a favorite.

The general plot of A Silent Voice is sorted into two time periods - a period where the main characters meet for the first time while very young during which one of them bullies the other to the point of ripping out her hearing aids and causing her to change schools, and a period where they are younger and the bully is about to kill himself because the guilt of what he had done weighs to heavily on him and wherein the two characters meet again.

The main female lead of the movie - Shouko - is deaf. It's been a while since I watched this movie, but I do believe they specify that she is deaf and not hard of hearing because someone asks once about her hearing aid.

Now I'm not deaf myself so I can't say for sure that the portrayal of Shouko's disability is good or bad, especially since aside from not having a disability like Shouko's I don't know anyone with a disability like Shouko's. However, A Silent Voice seems to talk about the struggles of being deaf in a very real way. It shows how Shouko's isolated from her peers when she moves schools because she can't communicate easily with them, her struggles to communicate with everyone from family to potential friends based off people's various levels of skill with sign language, her struggle with how her disability effects her family, and the financial strain of her disability.

And at the same time, Shouko is no different from most girls her age. She's shy and sweet, likes to throw bread to fishes to feed them and struggles with how flustered she gets around the boy she likes.

It's a great movie, to be honest, and Shouko is probably my favorite character because she's such a sweet girl. And I hope that it's as good as a portrayal of deafness as I think it is, because it would be a shame to find out that such a sweet movie was actually perpetuating something problematic.