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ANNCast (Video) - A Silent Voice

The idea that the horrible and traumatic experience of bullying being treated as part of a typical adolescence is wrong and ridiculous.

Really nice podcast. As a fan of the manga, I mostly agree with Jake in that the tone was my biggest problem, not because it misses the point but it misunderstands it. And it was a shame because that casual/mean whipslash tone between drama and humor not only I thought was a very big base of how the scenes were made (even if sometimes to its detriment with weird humor and over the top melodrama) but also, since the movie has to be very efficient, that tone alone could have made not only the scenes but the character's reactions and psychologies (especially Shoya) way more effective in very little time. Instead, the pleasant nostalgic tone with suavized restrained dialogue and piano music everywhere made it feel too soft, and the most brutal moments were undermined instead of being hard to watch (except the spoiler[attempted suicide], I agree that was effective).

On a more personal note I also miss all the other people perspectives, but in a movie it's hard to see how it would all fit so I get it. But maybe they should have cut off some characters to make the movie more fluid, especially the ones that lose their purpose when you discard the elements related to them (Mashiba for sure, but the scene that comes to my mind the most is spoiler[grandma's death], when you cut Shoko's mother's character so much the complicated family dynamics are lost and therefore that scene in the movie only serves to make Shoya closer to Yuzuru and foreshadow spoiler[her fear of Shoko's suicide] and that's it, little else).

About Ueno, I agree that she is kinda the societal backlash, but more than that my take on her is basically she knows she's horrible and selfish and hypocritical but she doesn't even try to reconsider her feelings and prefers to project which is why (aside of her jealousy) she wants Shoko to hate her to be both in the same page and sees Shoko's reservations and attitude as dishonest and phony instead of self-hating. At the same time she can also point out some hypocresies of those self-pitying attitudes that would preserve a lame status quo without adressing anything; but yeah she's completely selfish and selective about it just so it benefites Shoya and screws the rest, but I understood where she came from.
But that doesn't mean her actions are justifiable and I think the series is what is says: The beating scene in the hospital (most clear in the manga with Sahara acting too), when later Shoko tries to reconnect with her, and when she speaks with Shoya near the end of the manga: those scenes made me very clear that she started to see and appreciate their attitudes on self-improvement and comunication, and that's when self-hatred sinks in and considers herself the despicable one (and Shoya says that she can still change little by little); so I disagree with Zac and I think she changed as a character, and that those acts to apologize, calm down and understand that she rejected are fundamentally more important, even if they need to actually address the harsh stuff about it instead of ignore it. I completely understand people hating her and I did during many chunks of it (and indeed the series focus way too much on her jealousy to illustrate it), but I found her consistent and understandable in the same vein of the other characters.

When the manga was running, there were a disturbing number of people who sided with Ueno, particularly when she blamed Shouko for Shouya spoiler[being in the coma]. They actually argued that Shouko spoiler[was selfish for attempting suicide] and Ueno was right to call her out on it.

One aspect of the story the podcast didn't touch on was how Shouya's family was depicted. His sister only appears as a side character in the first few chapters, but it's clear she's having sex with older men despite still being in high school -- and she's doing it at home. After the flash forward, she has a daughter with the Brazilian guy, but the daughter seems to spend all her time with Shouya and Grandma, with the parents rarely showing up at all. You don't often see a set up like that in manga, but here it's tossed in as a minor detail.