The Anthem of the Heart hits most of its notes beautifully.
I was immediately taken with The Anthem of the Heart’s shattered fantasy as soon as it started. The new animated movie from the team behind Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day has a fairytale feel but stays mostly grounded in an often harsh reality, and it brilliantly balances its heavy moments with lighthearted ones. Although it grows cliched and empty toward the end, it remains a powerful and beautiful story about a girl learning to find her voice.
We want to hear it.
The film opens with Jun, a young girl prone to flights of fancy who is fascinated with the castle at the top of a nearby hill. She sees her dad driving away from the castle with a strange woman in his car, and Jun excitedly tells her mom, thinking her dad’s a prince. The castle is actually a love hotel. Jun’s parents separate, and her father tells her it’s all her fault, since she’s such a “chatterbox.” She then wanders up the hill and encounters a magical talking egg. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone with her words anymore, so the egg takes away her ability to speak. It’s a clever, harsh take on “be careful what you wish for” stories — the juxtaposition of fairytale magic and the despair of a child makes The Anthem of the Heart instantly compelling and rich.
The movie skips forward about 10 years, and now Jun never speaks. Her homeroom teacher assigns her and three others to plan a community outreach event, and she manages to painfully choke out that she doesn’t want to do it, shocking the class. The egg’s curse feels horribly malicious, and Jun’s obvious pain made me care about her. Even though she’s mired in a fantastical curse, her problems are real, and I acutely felt her despair.
We want to hear it.
She overhears one of the boys on the outreach committee, Sakagami, singing a song about eggs, and she’s immediately smitten with him, thinking he can see “into her heart.” He’s caring and understanding when she tells him (via text message) about her curse and how she gets a stomachache when she talks. In Jun’s fantastical mind — and, by extension, in mine — he’s a prince and a savior. Sakagami’s friendship leads her to interact more with everyone around her, and she’s incredibly animated and expressive, even without talking. Her reactions are adorable and bring a much-needed lightheartedness to parts that made me want to cry without taking away from the power of those emotions.
Sakagami tells her that if she can’t talk, maybe she can sing to express herself. It works, and I felt Jun’s triumph when she found her voice. However, this point in the movie started to plateau. Jun’s class agrees to make a musical that she’s written based on her experiences, and it balances the same hopeful-but-tragic, fantasy-but-reality tone almost as well… But it gets too heavy-handed with its message of the importance of self-expression. It was redundant for Sakagami to give Jun a short speech about how he doesn’t express himself well either, since it’s obvious that he’s a foil to her character. It’s a movie about expressing your feelings, but it would have been more powerful if they’d left some of those things unsaid.
We want to hear it.
Still, I adored The Anthem of the Heart’s overall message about Jun’s anxieties. Her inability to speak and the pain it causes her is an incredibly relatable portrayal of how anxiety can warp a person and isolate them from the world. Although Jun’s problems wrap up a little too neatly in a flat, cliche ending, seeing her find her voice and accept reality was meaningful and impactful.
Even though The Anthem of the Heart falls flat toward the end, it’s still a moving, beautiful movie. The animation looks great, and its tone is balanced nearly perfectly. It does get a bit heavy-handed with its message beginning in the second half, and it doesn’t have to — what it has to say about expressing your feelings is powerful enough on its own without the characters having to literally express it.
