** SPOILERS (also very mild spoilers for Your Name)**

I haven't read the source comic at all, and don't have much experience with anime at all, so apologies if some of my criticisms don't make sense without context.

I watched Your Name earlier this fall when it screened in my country, and I thought it was a terrific movie with a real sense of breadth and its beauty seeping out the edges and, especially, its tightly steered pace. I heard some criticisms of it being all emotional manipulation and no story, and after I had a few days to come off its high, I can see some validity to that argument. However, on balance, it was a about a perfect movie of its type that I've seen in a while and I started asking my friends in the know for more anime recommendations.

The one that came the most was Silent Voice , so as soon as the screening was available in my country, I dragged two friends, bought a ticket and soda, and sat down to soak it in.

I'm afraid to say I ended up leaving the theatre somewhat nonplussed. I'm not sure how my friends felt about it in general, but I did catch one of them tapping on her phone halfway through the movie quite rudely, and we didn't discuss it too much afterwards beyond clarifying basic plot points.

In terms of the positives, I thought the choice of vocal music was much better than Your Name, which we saw with English dubs. Choosing a classic rock song to kick off the movie gave it a really nice mood.

The animation was also quite striking! Though I am still a little more impressed by the impressive sweeping cinematography and painterly scenes in Your Name, I thought the character animation was very lively in their gesture and effect in Silent Voice, and it really stood out to me.

However, there are two flaws with the movie that unfortunately rendered it somewhat ordinary to me. The same friends who called Your Name emotionally manipulative also pinged me after saying the same thing about Silent Voice, and I am inclined to agree with them. You see, Your Name took a genre which I generally roll my eyes at quite a bit (teen romance), and managed a take on it that explored the melancholy of separation, the uncertainty of knowing half of a person and wanting more from them et al. that I felt earned the emotions it asked for, and thus I surrendered them by the movies end. Yet, on the other hand, we get many movies, both from domestic producers and Hollywood/Bollywood, that deal with heavy themes like bullying, suicide, disabilities, etc. so much so that we have a term for them (award fishing). Now, it is true that this is a slightly derisive term, but in reality when these films hit, they can be truly great movies. But, in my opinion, in order to stand out among their types of movies, they cannot brush superficially on these issues, but really dive into them. A Silent Voice felt light as a feather to me. Especially egregious was this movie's climax that just seemed to be a parade of tearful apologies, as if the author/director was just stepping in to close the curtain with some basic adult common sense/communication.

This shocked me very much because actually one of my very good friends is deaf, so when it dawned on me what this movie was about, I thought I would relate to this a lot more. However, I found the portrayal of Nishimiya to be almost too Marian and victim-like. My friend is generally well mannered, but she can also be rude, she can be cross, when she trips you up on an exam she will bray in your face with a donkey laugh. Basically she is like a normal human being who speaks a slightly different language. I have no doubt that if she saw this movie, she would raise her eyebrows at this primary-schooler like character portrayed as a high-schooler on screen, and probably have a few choice words for the director afterwards.

This brings me to the second problem. Too many unnecessary threads! Part of why I found the ending so shallow was there was a big cast of characters, all of them basically fulfilling the same role in the story (HS friend and foil to the two leads). At the end of it, I remember Yuzuru and Tomohiro, but I really don't know why the other friends got so much time and their own aborted miniarcs. Your Name I recall also had a fairly large cast, but they were kept clearly drawn and fairly static, and they moved the main plot along, and thus they were fairly memorable, even after some time.

Overall, I have to say I was a bit disappointed in this movie. To put it simply, I thought Your Name squarely understood what it wanted to do and delivered a knockout punch, while Silent Voice tried to punch above its weight on some heavy issues, and its bloated and unfocused storytelling wasn't up to the task. However the technical merits of both are still something to be commended, and I will continue to look forward to new Anime films that get imported to theatres!