ROGER EBERT
In
the waning days of World War Two, American bombers drop napalm canisters
on Japanese cities, creating firestorms. These bombs, longer than
a tin can but about as big around, fall
to earth trailing cloth tails that flutter
behind them; they are almost a beautiful sight. After they hit, there
is a moment's silence, and then they detonate, spraying their surroundings
with flames. In a Japanese residential neighborhood, made of flimsy
wood and paper houses, there is no way to fight the fires.
"Grave
of the Fireflies" is an animated film telling the story of two
children from the port city of Kobe, made homeless by the bombs. Seita
is a young teenager, and his sister
Setsuko is about five. Their father is serving
in the Japanese Navy, and their mother is a bomb victim; Seita kneels
beside her body, covered with burns, in an emergency hospital. Their
home, neighbors, schools, are all gone.
For a time an aunt takes them in, but
she's cruel about the need to feed them, and eventually Seita finds a
hillside cave where they can live. He
does what he can to find food, and to answer
Setsuko's questions about their parents. The first shot of the film
shows Seita dead in a subway station, and
so we can guess Setsuko's fate; we
are accompanied through flashbacks by the boy's spirit.
"Grave
of the Fireflies" is an emotional experience so powerful that
it forces a rethinking of animation. Since the earliest days, most
animated films have been
"cartoons" for children and families. Recent animated
features like "The Lion King," "Princess Mononoke"
and "The Iron Giant"
have touched on more serious themes, and the "Toy Story"
movies and classics like
"Bambi" have had moments that moved some audience members to
tears. But these films exist within safe
confines; they inspire tears, but not
grief. "Grave of the Fireflies" is a powerful dramatic film
that happens to be animated, and I
know what the critic Ernest Rister means when he
compares it to "Schindler's List" and says, "it is the
most profoundly human animated
film I've ever seen."
It
tells a simple story of survival. The boy and his sister must find
a place to stay, and food to eat. In wartime their relatives are not
kind or generous, and after their aunt
sells their mother's kimonos for rice,
she keeps a lot of the rice for herself. Eventually, Sieta realizes
it is time to leave. He has some money
and can buy food--but soon there is no
food to buy. His sister grows weaker. Their story is told not as melodrama,
but simply, directly, in the neorealist tradition. And there is time
for silence in it. One of the film's greatest gifts is its patience;
shots are held so we can think about
them, characters are glimpsed in private
moments, atmosphere and nature are given time to establish themselves.
Japanese
poets use "pillow words" that are halfway between pauses
and punctuation, and the great director
Ozu uses "pillow shots"--a detail from
nature, say, to separate two scenes. "Grave of the Fireflies"uses them, too. Its visuals create
a kind of poetry. There are moments of quick action,
as when the bombs rain down and terrified people fill the streets,
but this film doesn't exploit action; it
meditates on its consequences.
click to review shot sequence
The
film was directed by Isao Takakata, who is associated with the famous
Ghibli Studio, source of the greatest Japanese animation. His colleague
there is Hayao Miyazaki ("Princess Mononoke," "Kiki's
Delivery Service," "My
Neighbor Totoro"). His films are not usually this serious, but
"Grave of the Fireflies" is in a category by itself. It's
based on a semi-autobiographical
novel by Nosaka Akiyuki--who was a young boy at the time
of the firebombs, whose sister did die of hunger, and whose life has
been shadowed by guilt.
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The book is well-known
in Japan, and might easily have inspired a live-action
film. It isn't the typical material of animation. But for "Grave
of the Fireflies," I think animation was the right choice. Live
action would have been burdened by the
weight of special effects, violence and
action. Animation allows Takakata to concentrate on the essence of the
story, and the lack of visual realism in
his animated characters allows our imagination
more play; freed from the literal fact of real actors, we can more
easily merge the characters with our own associations.
Hollywood
animation has been pursuing the ideal of "realistic animation"
for decades, even though that's an oxymoron. People who are drawn
do not look like people who are photographed. They're more stylized,
more obviously symbolic, and (as Disney
discovered in painstaking experiments)
their movements can be exaggerated to communicate mood through body
language. "Grave of the Fireflies" doesn't attempt even the
realism of a film like "The
Lion King" or "Princess Mononoke," but paradoxically it
is the most realistic animated
film I've ever seen--in feeling.
The locations and
backgrounds are drawn in a style owing something to
the 18th century Japanese artist Hiroshige, and his modern disciple
Herge (the creator of Tin Tin). There is
great beauty in them--not cartoon beauty,
but evocative landscape drawing, put through the filter of animated
style. The characters are typical of much
modern Japanese animation, with their
enormous eyes, childlike bodies, and features of great plasticity
(mouths are tiny when closed, but
enormous when opened in a child's cry--we
even see Setsuko's tonsils). This film proves, if it needs proving,
that animation produces emotional effects not by reproducing reality,
but by heightening and simplifying it, so that many of the sequences
are about ideas, not experiences.
There
are individual moments of great beauty. One involves a night when
the children
catch fireflies and use them to illuminate their cave. The
next day, Seita finds his little sister carefully burying the dead
insects--as she imagines her mother was
buried. There is another sequence in
which the girl prepares "dinner" for her brother by using mud
to make "rice balls" and
other imaginary delicacies. And note the timing and the use
of silence in a sequence where they find a dead body on the beach, and
then more bombers appear far away in the
sky. Rister singles out another shot:
"There's a moment where the boy Seita traps an air bubble with a
wash rag, submerges it, and then releases
it into his sister Setsuko's delighted
face--and that's when I knew I was watching something special."
There are ancient
Japanese cultural currents flowing beneath the surface
of "Grave of the Fireflies," and they're explained by the
critic Dennis H. Fukushima, Jr.,
who finds the story's origins in the tradition of double-suicide
plays. It is not that Seita and Setsuko commit suicide overtly,
but that life wears away their will to live. He also draws a parallel
between their sheltering cave, and hillside tombs.
Fukushima cites an
interview with the author, Nosaka: "Having been the
sole survivor, he felt guilty for the death of his sister. While scrounging
for food, he had often fed himself first, and his sister second. Her
undeniable cause of death was hunger, and it was a sad fact that would
haunt Nosaka for years. It prompted him
to write about the experience, in hopes
of purging the demons tormenting him."
Because it is
animated and from Japan, "Grave of the Fireflies" has been
little seen. When anime (cq) fans say how good the film is, nobody
takes them seriously. Now that it's
available on DVD with a choice of subtitles
or English dubbing, maybe it will find the attention it deserves.
Yes, it's a cartoon, and the kids have
eyes like saucers, but it belongs on any
list of the greatest war films ever made. |