Kimi no Koe wo Todoketai

Enjoyable overall. For me: a keeper in my anime archive. Fun characters with individuality (talents, and quirks, even), purpose, and development. Observant of details of everyday life in the Enoshima/Fujisawa area, set during a high school summer break. Embedded within its creative kit, it sympathetically explores subtle and sublime elements of Shinto spiritualism, primarily kotodama, but also the concept of spirits inhabiting other bits of our world, and our exchanges with same. Asks a bit of generosity from the viewer regarding some of its details, plot, and development, but I found this was easily granted.

Rather emphatic on the ... values of human expression ala the spoken word and music, but in a good way. Admirable artwork, color palette, set consideration and design, blending of CG with handwork, and consistency of how frames, movements, and soundtracks are presented and progressed. Asks a bit of extra acceptance for its choice of story resolution and its closure with a musical-within-a-movie ending, but it's still within creative license. It possesses a sweetness and superlative charms that won me over. Yes, I want Kimi no Koe wo Todoketai in my world.

Thought the movie was good or so but I was honestly let down. The drama is just too excessive and the story is far too simple.

The main character Nagisa was just a flop. She seemed to exaggerate her feelings and it was just too much unrealistic. The overdramatic way she bursts into a keen girl to know about others is just silly. Also the moment when Shion’s mom woke up after 12 years just on their way out of the town is just too much for a coincidence.

The story is damn plain. 6 girls on their summer vacation got along in a studio ... to do radio broadcast for recovering one’s mom who laid in coma for 12 years after an accident. After having their studio taken over and Shion’s mom being transferred out of the town, the remaining 5 girls along with the help of the townsmen, held their last radio broadcast in a temple yard. Astonishingly, the song played on the broadcast by everyone, reached Shion’s mom and she finally recovers. Am I the only one who dislikes this straight story?

Including and talking about Kotodama was the only thing I liked as, I myself am a kotodama believer. Kotodama simply means the power that each person’s speech holds. If you desire something good, your kotodama will eventually come to reality but if you despise someone with your words, then your own kotodama will come back to hunt you.

Ok so let me say this, if you have no more movies in your plan, then watch this. This movie most likely will irritate you for excessive drama but you may find it a bit comforting if you are looking for simple social anime life.

I watched Kimi no Koe wo Todoketai, also known as I Want To Deliver Your Voice. Here are my thoughts:

This is just a ~90-minute movie, so I'll try to be brief.

It should be noted that I'm a huge sucker for anything relating to DJing, or radio, or talk shows, or just anything that involves sharing audio with others really. For this reason I thought I might like this movie, and was cautiously optimistic about it.

The plot of this feels kind of unfocused, and most of the movie consists of the various teenage girl characters messing around in this radio cafe place. There is some petty ... drama among the teenage girls. Throughout its runtime this movie alters between SoL-like scenes (that often involve radio), and various kinds of drama. This movie felt pretty 'family friendly', in the sense that I could imagine both a child and adult enjoying it. There was nothing inappropriate in here for a child audience (well, maybe aside from one character being in a preexisting long-term coma, and a bitchy slap in one scene during an argument among the girls).

The main premise of this movie is cool and promising. Much of the story revolves around the existence of 'kotodama', which are basically word spirits. The idea is that spoken word has the power to influence reality via these word spirits. I thought this was a great idea for a story, but unfortunately the execution in this case is very mediocre. I also wish they spent more time in general developing this aspect of the story. Although there are some good ideas, the actual scene-by-scene storyline of this anime is pretty uninteresting.

This movie feels amateurish as well as low budget, which is kinda surprising since it came out of Madhouse. I really do not like the character designs – they are ugly and overly simplistic. Furthermore, the character animation is lackluster and the facial expressions lack detail. The setting sometimes looks decent, but definitely not above average for a modern anime movie. Overall the visuals are lacking.

Ironically (recall title), the voice acting in this is pretty bad, overall. The MC in particular has really amateurish-sounding voicework, which is unfortunate, especially considering the importance of voice in this movie. Most of the music they play is well-known classical that you've likely heard before; it was pretty underwhelming. It felt like they played it overly safe by sticking to classical music. Also, teenage girls knowing and liking Vivaldi definitely required some suspension of disbelief. I think it was a poor decision to use classical music for this. There is a song near the end of the movie that the girls sing together; their singing actually sounds surprisingly good, especially in chorus. Nice lyrics too. I would have enjoyed this movie more if they included more scenes like that. The vocals in the ED song were surprisingly good as well.

It's worth mentioning that, despite the short runtime, this movie is well paced and the ending is neat and tidy. They didn't bite off more than they could chew. I also want to mention that there is zero romance (or any sexualization at all) in this, which I was grateful for. All the main characters in this are female, and males are barely relevant beyond facilitating the plot.


My overall rating: 4/10
Although its premise has a lot of potential, and there are some good ideas in the writing, the execution of this movie is unmistakably mediocre.

As far as anime movies go, this wouldn't be a bad choice to watch with a kid or young teenager; I think that's one aspect of this that could be a selling point. There aren't many anime movies I could say that about, so I think it's noteworthy. In particular, I can imagine a young girl (like, about age 8-12) really enjoying this due to all the early-teens female social dynamics it contains, and this movie overall has kind of a girly Disney-like vibe to it. In fact the more I think about it, the more I'm realizing that this anime was made with a young female audience in mind. This movie seems like something a mother and daughter could enjoy together.

I've seen multiple people liken this movie to Kimi no Na wa and Koe no Katachi – this assertion of similarity is utterly moronic and not based in reality. Aside from being a drama with a similar title, this has very little in common with those two other movies. Anybody saying this is "the Madhouse response to [KnNw/KnK]..." has meme brainworms and isn't analyzing things objectively. I don't know the reasoning behind this movie's title choice, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a marketing gimmick designed to catch attention and spark discussion due to its similarity to the aforementioned well-known titles. Maybe there's a story to be told regarding that.