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January
20, 2003
When the American movie-going public is constantly being fed junk
food, it ruins their sensibilities. They don't trust their better
instincts. Whenever I tell anyone who will listen that Grave of
the Fireflies is the greatest animated movie ever made, I'm greeted
with strange looks. Nobody really believes me. In America, "animation"
means children's cartoons, usually the formulaic tripe peddled by
Disney, and usually for no better reason than to sell their corporate
products. But Grave of the Fireflies is a masterpiece; it is great
in the way that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is great. It transcends
its genre.
It's
hard to get someone fired up about a movie that's so hard to define.
If a friend asks you what the movie is about, you say it is a Japanese
animated period drama, set in the Neo-Realist tradition, about two
children who starve to death in the aftermath of the Kobe firebombing
in WWII. Not exactly the way to reach someone who just shoved Shrek
in front of their kids.
Fireflies
is produced by the great Studio Ghibli, home of Hayao Miyazaki,
the legendary animator and director whose films - My Neighbor Totoro,
Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away - are masterful in their own right.
Isao Takahata, who wrote and directed this picture, is Miyazaki's
colleague; the two have often worked together, and his film was
placed on a double bill with Totoro for its Japanese premiere in
1988. That's always been a great irony: thematically, the two movies
couldn't be more different.
The story
is based on a bestselling novel by Akiyuki Nosaka called Hotaru
no Haka ("A Grave of Fireflies"). A survivor of the destruction
of Kobe in World War II, Nosaka battled starvation and actually
lost his younger sister to malnutrition; he often felt responsible
for her death (when starving, he would often feed himself first).
Haunted for years by the experience, he wrote the book in hopes
of silencing the ghosts surrounding him.
Like
the book, the movie focuses almost exclusively on two children -
14-year-old Seita, and 4-year-old Setsuko - whose home is destroyed
in the Kobe bombing. All throughout, there is an encroaching sense
of isolation. Seita and Setsuko lose their home. Then they lose
their mother. They travel to the home of a distant aunt, who turns
out to be distant in more ways than one. Increasingly irritated,
almost bothered, the aunt coldly discards the children; they lose
their surrogate home and live in a hillside bomb shelter. The surrounding
adults, the farmers and the doctors and the officers, either don't
care or can't bother to notice the orphaned two. The world itself
seems to be collapsing around them. They lose everything, and then
they lose each other. But we witness more than loss; we witness
the struggle to maintain one's dignity in the face of ongoing tragedy.
Grave
of the Fireflies is such an emotional experience that it's difficult,
and damn near impossible for some, to make it through in one sitting.
Take one pivotal scene, for instance. The children's aunt is persuading
Seita to give up his mother's garments so they can be sold. Setsuko
awakens to see her aunt taking the clothes, and starts screaming,
crying; she comes completely undone. Seita is struggling to hold
her back and he's coming undone. The kicker is that the girl doesn't
know her mother's dead. All the while, Seita's ghost is watching
(and presumably narrating), and he's coming undone; he can't bear
to hear his sister's cries. At least half the movie is like this.
When
speaking about this film, Takahata and Nosaka confess that this
story is better suited for animation, and they may be right. Perhaps
this simply couldn't work with live actors. We would be too self-conscious
of the sight of a real 4-year-old suffering; it would either look
overly maudlin or hokey. But when animated, we more readily accept
what Takahata shows us. It's realistic, but in the sense that Picasso
and Monet and Billie Holiday is real. We allow ourselves to lower
our guard, and Grave of the Fireflies speaks poetic truths. With
its warm humanity, you feel emotions pulled out of you that you
never knew you had. There's no word to describe the moment when
you laugh and cry at the same time; but there should be.
Fireflies
is equally full of moments of serene beauty, scenes of an almost
quiet peace. Visually, this is a beautiful movie. Everything is
drawn in lush, vivid watercolors; the greens and blues of the lake,
the saturated reds of a devastated Kobe, even the smoke from the
bombers looks poetic. A bucket, a mop, a well - the film is littered
with these snapshots of tiny details. These transitory shots of
nature remind one of Ozu and Tartovski and even Miyazaki. It's almost
necessary to allow for meditation, and it adds an almost spiritual
dimension. This style of filmmaking is almost unheard of in animation.
In the film's finest moment, the two children fill their cave with
fireflies from the lake. The look on their faces is almost rapturous
joy. The fireflies are gathered, they fly around the cave. The children
fall asleep. The fireflies glow, they slowly dim, and they die.
In the morning, Setsuko buries them, invokes her dead mother, and
the heartbreak resumes.
You can't
imagine any director pulling this off in America, especially with
Disney's stranglehold on animation. But after watching, how can
you imagine anyone not making films like this? How can you ever
settle for the same routine again? There are very few movies that
can move me to tears: the Louie Armstrong montage in Bowling for
Columbine, much of Schindler's List, the latter half of E.T., the
ending of Crouching Tiger. The sweep and beauty of Grave of the
Fireflies surpasses them all; it reaches us at a far deeper level.
When confronted with this almost intimate horror of war, we don't
cry, we mourn; we grieve as though we had watched our own children
die.
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