Grave of the Fireflies
The same animation studio and acclaimed director who created Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro also produced Grave of the Fireflies, about the firebombing of Japan during WWII. AVN showed it last night and I'm still recovering. This animated film is the most relentlessly heartbreaking movie I've ever seen. The protagonists are a teenage boy, and a four-year-old girl that is exactly like my four-year-old niece. During the movie their home, school, workplace and even their mother all burn; they are evicted by relatives, live in a hole in the ground, get beaten up and turned in to the police for stealing crops, the father does not return to save them because his ship sinks, and they die in each other's arms from malnutrition. No Disney cartoon, this. Disney only makes merchandisable movies, and if they made a talking doll of this girl, when you pull the cord she wouldn't just say "I love you," she'd also plaintively say things like "I'm hungry," "I have diarrhea," "when can we see mommy in the hospital?" and "auntie told me they put mommy in the ground." Not only is there no happy ending, but the "camera" POV never flinches away from explicitly depicting the maggots crawling on the corpse of their mother, or from the suffering of the children. What few scenes of redemptive joy occur-- playing on the seashore and collecting fireflies-- are intruded on by human death. I wonder why Miyazaki made this animated film to watch a grieving four-year-old die while covered in sores?
I warned you not to click that LJ-cut. I wish I hadn't watched it.
What was really weird about this movie were the constant recruitment ads for the U.S. military during the commercial breaks. The film is not anti-U.S.-- no attention is focused on whoever is in the plane shooting at this boy or dropping napalm on his mom. Only on the cruelty and indifference of their neighbors and relatives. I don't think the U.S. would even be thought about, were it not for the commercials the cable channel happened to run in this jarringly incongruous context.
Comments
phecda on May. 4, 2005 8:00 PM
Although no where as severe as what happened to Tokyo (or Hiroshima and Nagasaki for that matter), Coventry or Dresden (you should watch Slaughterhouse 5 sometime), I got lots of stories about my parents living through the London Blitz, and subsequent bombings including V1 and V2 rockets. Americans in general really have no concept of what war really is (excluding the poor bastards that have been deployed in an active war zone).
If you want another similar heartwrencher, I can recomend the British docudrama "Threads", about a hypothetical nuclear attack, though I don't know if it's available anywhere. Not as graphic, but neither does it pull punches.
Next time you watch something like that, record it. I'd like to see it, even if it is horrifying and heart breaking.
rikhei on May. 4, 2005 9:43 PM
I remember feeling the same way when I saw it. It was up there with "Life is Beautiful" for movies I will never watch again. I'm not sure if I wish I hadn't seen it, though.
matt-arnold on (None)
matt-arnold on May. 5, 2005 12:50 PM
I disagree with this appraisal. In fact, Life Is Beautiful was the first movie I thought of which prompted me to keep viewing Grave of the Fireflies in the hopes that it would develop in the same way. A tragedy is an acceptable literary form to me when it's life-affirming, and LIB is the ultimate example. The negative climax of LIB is one of the most powerful emotional experiences I've ever had, and it is painful, but the scene with the boy and the tank that immediately follows is the true climax of the film. It makes the whole film make sense and is the life-affirming moment. I recommend Life Is Beautiful to anyone.
rikhei on May. 5, 2005 1:32 PM
I suppose I hadn't thought about it that way; I was thinking of both movies in terms of my visceral reaction, which was to cry very hard and long after they finished.
protoblues on May. 5, 2005 4:25 AM
There was one more thing that was very wrong about GotFF. When it originally was in theaters, it was shown as a double feature along with My Neighbor Totoro.
cathyr19355 on May. 5, 2005 5:40 AM
The film is not anti-U.S.-- no attention is focused on whoever is in the plane shooting at this boy or dropping napalm on his mom.
That may just be an artifact of the way the Japanese in general look at WWII. In "Dave Barry Does Japan", Barry describes what he saw when he attended the Japanese commemoriation ceremony at Hiroshima. It had the same odd neutrality about the US, as though the war was just something that happened out of the blue, that had nothing to do with people's choices. It disturbed Barry, and in a way made him angry. I'd quote him, but I've just remembered that I loaned out my copy, so I don't have the book handy.
fuzzysputnik on Jun. 9, 2005 3:30 PM
I happen to love GotFF. It is terribly heart rending and has a certain hoplessness about it and that's why I like it. The Hollywood endings that most films feature aren't often fufilling to me because they are so common that they instruct the viewer that happy endings are to be expected. I like that someone decided to develop a film that admits that sometimes things are really bad, and you try and you try and it's completely out of your hands. We're taught that we control our destiny and can be anything we want. It's an empowering thing to believe, but we've lost the sort of temperance that this film offers.
matt-arnold on Jun. 9, 2005 5:13 PM
Good point. Thanks for bringing it up.
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