The story follows a college student's reminiscence of a high school love triangle (if you can even call it that) between himself, a proto-tsundere type girl who transfers in from Tokyo and can't help standing out from the other girls, and the close male friend who 'saw her first' that the MC would never betray. Now, at this point you probably think you have this story all figured out, its got all the familiar teen-romance anime tropes after all, but this really isn't even that kind of story.
Actually, Umi ga Kikoeru is a complex meditation on Japanese high school life and its values (conformity, thinking about what's best for the group, placing the needs of your friends before all else) as well as the changes in perspective that occur when one losses that sense of belonging. Great emphasis is placed on the fact that this story is about *Japanese* high school students as I'm fairly certain that most American viewers won't find it even slightly relatable. Actually, one of the common takeaways I've heard from non-Japanese viewers is that the movie has a lot of gay subtext which really just goes to show you that "high school" isn't some universal experience that transcends cultures.
All things considered, this Ghibli deep cut isn't easy to recommend to most viewers. It's dated for sure, distinctly Japanese, and too literary for entertaining genre trappings; but it isn't just some cheap made-for-TV movie intended to provide a moments entertainment and then to be forgotten either like one might expect. In many ways I'd compare it to an earlier Ghibli film Only Yesterday, but Umi ga Kikoeru is a more ambitious and mature film and I personally enjoyed it a lot more.
