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Watch the emotionally intense anime movie A Silent Voice before it leaves Netflix
It’s no particular wonder why so much anime across so many genres and eras focuses on high school settings: It’s a intense period full of radical new experiences. And while young people often don’t recognize this until much later in life, it’s often a period where they’re learning how to be human and how to understand other humans, without guidelines or a basic toolkit. American media about high school usually heightens that dynamic in different ways from Japanese media, often presenting students as precocious, self-defined, and so hyper-verbal that they seem like particularly petty adults. (Just look at Mean Girls — Rachel McAdams was 26 when she played Regina George in that movie.)