![]() I know they shoot each other, shoot videos, to see how the action should work. “But I think the actual animators do it themselves. Did Yamada have people thwack each other in front of her when she was planning out the fights? “When I’m directing it, I don’t need real people,” she laughed. I’m the one who’s angry, or the one who’s falling…”Īnimated films often use live-action reference, people acting out motions for real. “When I did the storyboard, I became all the characters. Yamada created these scenes in storyboard form. There’s an early, furious altercation between the young Shoya and Shoko in primary school, and an even rawer bust-up between characters outside a hospital. At the risk of harping on negativity, some of A Silent Voices’s most arresting scenes are fights. The mother slapping Shoya is not the only violence. It was very difficult to give the same impact as the manga (in the film).” And I wanted the audience to understand the emotions, so I had to take time to make that, and that one page is much longer in the movie. ![]() In the manga, it’s a page – you turn to the page, bang! But in the film, I had to describe how Shoya felt before he was hit, and when he was hit, and after, and also how the mother felt before, during and after. For example, there’s a scene where Shoko’s mother slaps Shoya. In a movie, the time goes as the film goes. “With a manga, readers can read at their own pace. Yamada conceded there were many difficulties in adapting the manga as a film. Their behaviour, their ideas could give people a clue about who Shoko is and why she behaves as she does. However, as a filmmaker, I couldn’t not put in things… So, I used the point of view of Yuzuru or Shoko’s mother or grandmother. Yamada said, “One of the things I discussed with Oima was that, ‘It’s the story of Shoya, so don’t deal with anything that he can’t see and understand.’ If Shoya can’t understand why Shoko is behaving this way or that way, then we don’t deal with that. Older and guilt-ridden, the teen Shoya tentatively tries to form a friendship with his former victim, though he’s always unsure what Shoko really feels about their renewed acquaintance. The young Shoya bullies Shoko because he can’t understand her. “I think the whole theme of the film is about communication, understanding and not understanding,” said Yamada. Understanding is central to A Silent Voice. I wanted to put in some positive aspects there are happy moments in everyone.”īut even so, I persisted, wasn’t A Silent Voice a new direction for Kyoto Animation? Again, though, Yamada didn’t see it that way, suggesting A Silent Voice wasn’t so different from K-ON! “They’re different things, but the basic concepts I was thinking of when I made both are the human spirit, love, emotions and understanding.” I think many people can empathise with the dark thoughts, the seriousness, but I didn’t want the audience to be drawn into that negativity. Yes, it is a serious movie we deal with bullying and dark thoughts, but that’s not the whole theme of the film. At the time, I was struck by the apparent contrast between the film and Yamada’s much cheerier earlier series, especially K-ON! However, when I asked if Yamada thought it was a new kind of film, she said no. I interviewed Yamada in 2017, when A Silent Voice was having a limited cinema release in Britain. She also helmed individual episodes of Clannad, Hyouka and Miss Kobayshi’s Dragon Maid. Years before K-ON!, she was animating on Kyoto Animation’s Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid, followed by stints on Air, Kanon, Clannad, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star. It’s wrong, though, to think of Yamada as just a director she also has a huge number of animation credits. However, Yoshida did come onboard for the Liz and the Blue Bird film. The exception is the Sound! Euphonium TV series, which was scripted by Jukki Hanada (also lead writer on the Steins Gate anime). “I feel like she is a mum to me,” Yamada said when I interviewed her. On nearly all of these anime, Yamada has had a constant collaborator, the prolific screenwriter Reiko Yoshida. As for Liz and the Blue Bird in 2018, this is technically a spinoff from Sound! Euphonium, though it’s also very much a self-contained piece that you can watchperfectly well on its own. Yamada also directed Tamako Love Story, the 2014 big-screen sequel to Tamako Market. Her other cinema films are linked to her TV series, starting with her 2011 film of K-ON!, which memorably took the loveable girl musicians to London, and as she told crowds in Scotland, introduced them to the phenomenon of dog-poo bins. Of her cinema works, Yamada is most famous for 2016’s A Silent Voice.
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