A Silent Voice Announces Campaign For An Oscar Nomination

A Silent Voice has already taken its fair share of awards, but the studio has their eyes set on one golden prize in particular.

The critically acclaimed film from Naoko Yamada (K-On!) and Reiko Yoshida (Digimon) already has a few high honors to its name, including Film of the Year from the Tokyo Anime Award Festival and Best Animation of the Year from the Japan Movie Critics Awards. Eleven Arts Studios would love to add another award to that resume though and recently announced that it will qualify the film for the Academy Awards Feature Animation category (via Cartoon Brew).

A Silent Voice joins two other films int eh category, those being Mary and the Witch’s Flower (GKIDS) and In This Corner of the World (Shout Factory). Neither of those is a Studio Ghibli production, which could either work in its favor or against it, depending on how you look at it.

The pro on that front is “hey, there isn’t a Ghibli film to steal my shine!”, which could help Silent Voice’s chances in getting nominated. Unfortunately, the Academy Awards have a very distinct track record when it comes to nominating animated features. Over the past 16 years, the Academy Wars have nominated six features from Japan, and all six have something in common. All six are Ghibli productions.

So, the Academy could use this as an opportunity to give the spotlight to some non-Ghibli productions, or they might overlook it because it doesn’t have a bigger name attached. Hopefully, it isn’t the latter, as these three more than deserve a fair shake.

For those who aren’t familiar, A Silent Voice was originally a manga written by Yoshitoki Oima, which follows a boy named Shoya Ishida. Ishida is a bit of a bully during his school days and picks constantly on a girl named Shoko Nishimiya who happens to be deaf. The two exit each other’s lives after elementary school, but when Shoyo is older he can’t shake the thought of how he treated her, and so he seeks her out to try and atone for his sins.

A Silent Voice lands in stateside theaters on October 20, 2017, and you can view the trailer in the video above.

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