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1988 • Grave of the Fireflies

Hotaru no Haka

— Robert Walker —

Grave of the Fireflies opens with its two leads—children—starving to death. And it’s all downhill from there. As a film, it demands not so much to be watched, but experienced. Just what that experience is I cannot say. Words fail me even years later. In the absence of anything better, I can only cough up one word: devastating.

The inherent power of the film only intensifies when one realizes it’s based on the semi-autobiographical account of its author, Akiyuki Nosaka. Written in 1967, it chronicles a similar story of an orphaned boy in wartime Japan who takes charge of his younger sister. In it, she dies, and he soon follows. In reality, Nosaka survived, and the story was written as a way to work through his survivor’s guilt. In the film’s opening sequence, a destitute boy passes out in a train station. Onlookers, already weary of the imminent arrival of American forces after the nation’s surrender, pass him by with disgust. The boy’s radiant spirit then rises from his body, looking nothing like the emaciated husk lying in a heap on the concrete. The spirit spots that of a young girl, his sister. The two ghosts then disappear happily into a field of glowing fireflies.

Set in the final months of World War II, Grave of the Fireflies follows fourteen-year-old Seita and his four-year-old sister Setsuko. Their mother suffers from a heart condition, and their father is a Captain in the Imperial Navy—though he hasn’t written back in sometime. When an American air raid unleashes fiery hell upon the city, their mother orders them to run, knowing full well she can’t.

She dies.

Horrifically.

It’s this scene, where the children stumble upon the bandaged, bloodied, burned body of their mother, that sends the most chills to the heart. The camera lingers. No shying away. And in this moment, their doom is set.

From that point on, Seita takes it upon himself to watch over his younger sister. With the city in ruins, he carries her on his back to his aunt’s home. The aunt agrees they can stay. At first, all seems well. Seita returns with some of his mother’s belongings, and gives them to their aunt. All save for a tin of fruit drops, which he gives to Setsuko—a now infamous recurring image in the film. As the weeks slip by, though, Japan’s wartime effort continues to deteriorate, taking the economy down with it. Food is rationed. The aunt now has her own daughter and a niece and nephew to feed. Tensions rise. His aunt accuses Seita of being a good for nothing freeloader. Then she sells his mother’s belonging for rations. Too emotionally attached, Seita comes to blows with his aunt. He decides to run off with Setsuko.

From there, they live a seemingly idyllic life in an old bomb shelter near the woods. For a time, they seem happy. And its these rare moments of joy that catch the viewer off guard. Much like James Cameron’s Titanic, we know what must inevitably happen. But it’s a testament to Isao Takahata’s direction that it sometimes slips into the background.

Sadly, grim portents foreshadow what’s to come. To light their shelter, Seita lets in a swarm of fireflies. The next morning, Setsuko cries out that they’re all dead. Horrified, she buries them in a grave and asks with childlike naiveté, “Why do fireflies have to die? Why did mother have to die?”

Slowly, the pair’s wilderness adventure becomes a battle for survival. They run out of rice. Seita goes so far as to steal food. As Setsuko wastes away, Seita takes her to a doctor, who can only recommend she eat. Finally, not long after, he realizes in abject terror that she’s been sucking on marbles while he’s gone—thinking, in her hallucinogenic state, that they are the fruit drops from the little tin. He rushes to the bank to withdraw what little money his mother had left, and returns with supplies. Perhaps. We, the audience, can only beg. Perhaps—?

But we’ve all seen the ending.

What saves Grave of the Fireflies from rote sentimentality is its unflinching view of the frail human condition. People make mistakes, especially in situations of high stress. The aunt receives the blunt force of this view. She all but pushes them out by making them feel most unwelcome. Her insistence that fourteen-year-old Seita enlist smacks of unreasonable expectations. In 1945, he’d still be a year short to serve. And even if he could, it would be a virtual death sentence.

More ambiguous is her demand that Seita get a job. Possible? Perhaps. Likely in that crumbling economy? Questionable. The movie makes a wise decision not to answer that question with any certainty. Did Seita truly look? Or, as the privileged boy who lost everything, did he not want to suffer the indignity of doing factory grunt work? He idolizes his father as a military hero—an officer!—and one wonders if he thought such a move was beneath him. For Seita, lowering himself becomes an admission of defeat. His life stolen from him, he seems hell-bent to reclaim it on his own terms.

As social commentary, the whole movie plays like a condemnation of the Japanese concept of “saving face.” Ever enshrining the Confucian concepts of family and honor, the whole system crumbles when faced with the reality of a disastrous war. Honor becomes a liability. Family a burden. Society frays at the edges, and this leads to bad decisions with tragic results. Sure, it’s easy to lay blame on Seita. But who are the adults in the room? The aunt considers it her patriotic duty to sweep these freeloaders out in lieu of her own daughter. The doctor offers advice, but no food or medicine. A farmer beats Seita for stealing. And the onlookers at the train station look upon his frail body with disgust. Simple human revulsion? Or the realization that, having suffered a humiliating defeat, the invaders will now see Japan’s shame on full display in the streets?

As for Seita—he’s fourteen. Homeless. Motherless. Potentially fatherless. And now saddled with a younger sister to care for. What young teenager is equipped to deal with such a burden? Some may rise to the challenge, but Seita joins the long list of poor souls who just couldn’t cut it. His pride mimics that of any teenager. But it’s also a reflection of his nation’s. And it kills him. His quest for nonconformity makes a mockery of the privilege and freedom enjoyed by the likes of Miyazaki’s fantasy heroine, Kiki. Here, a similar quest for individuality leads to disaster.

That Miyazaki chose to pass Grave of the Fireflies onto Takahata makes perfect sense. And it was a master stroke. Takahata himself survived the Okayama City bombing as a child, which explains the realism of the harrowing air raid sequence. Asking Miyazaki to direct this film would be like asking Walt Disney to direct The Killing Fields. Grave isn’t without whimsy, but the price is steep.

The animation reinforces this dichotomy with fire-bombings, shriveled corpses, and heaps of rubble. Yet a sort of magical realism gives it a sense of meaning. Sunsets glisten. Fireflies glow. The shadows of leaves roll across the children’s faces as they sleep in the afternoon haze. The natural world offers a mystical respite from the horrors of war. Unfortunately, like the pied piper, it also takes no prisoners—leading its victims down a bucolic path from which they’ll never return. Nature, too, doesn’t discriminate.

Yet, it’s these Eden-like passages that give Grave its few moments of tenderness. Takahata’s world, for all its brutality, remains soft around the edges—just like in his other films, Only Yesterday and Princess Kaguya. For this film, he employed a new technique, switching out the normal black outlines for brown. This gives the universe a nostalgic, nearly sepia tone feel. It’s warm. Dreamlike. Strangely spiritual. Like a memory.

It’s a memory etched into the Japanese consciousness. Perhaps best reflected in the final moments, which see their spirits walking into the modern skyline of Kobe. And yet, though clearly aimed at the Japanese, it plays just as well overseas. Many critics hail it as one of the best anti-war films ever made. Ironic, since Takahata insists it is not an anti-war movie, and he didn’t intend it as such. Whoops.

To a certain degree, I understand where he’s coming from. None of the characters share an anti-war sentiment. Seita’s father serves in the Navy. He has a vested interest in Japan “winning.” The cognitive dissonance on display perhaps reflects the station in his life. Still just a boy, the idea that his father lies at the bottom of the ocean is probably more than he can bear. Better to hope for the best.

And perhaps that’s why it plays so well as an anti-war film. The best anti-war movies don’t pick sides. Indeed, the Americans are barely shown at all. And yet, for all the nonexistent amount of screen time they receive, every American owes it to themselves to see this film. Stripped of the sort of jingoistic demonization prevalent in most war films, Grave of the Fireflies simply shows the after-effects. It invites Americans to empathize with “the other” by looking directly into their eyes. No lectures or speechifying. Just experience. The message is universal because war is universal. It’s a sad part of the human condition. And Takahata, whether he intended it or not, understands that it’s those who have the least say in wartime that suffer the most. Nations break down. Society breaks down. People break down. It’s the ultimate failure in imagination.

Like the fireflies Seita uses to light his bomb shelter, the lives of the children are equally bright and short. All too quickly they’re snuffed out—used up and forgotten by an all too indifferent world. It’s enough to make a grown man cry. And trust me, it has.

Because of its emotional weight, some argue that the film is overly sentimental—a well-intentioned, but very deliberately crafted tearjerker. I’d argue that if you’re watching children starve, you’d damn well better be made to cry. Or at least suppress some tears. And Grave of the Fireflies avoids the tropes of so many other lesser films that use kids as props. The two children aren’t plot devices shoehorned in with some inexplicable cancer or accident or malady designed as a last, desperate attempt to milk some eleventh-hour waterworks. It’s literally the centerpiece of the whole picture. Grave shows its hand in the first minute, telling the viewer in no uncertain terms exactly what they’re getting into. And that something is a sucker punch to the soul.

As a movie, I can’t recommend Grave of the Fireflies in the same way I would other anime. You’re not going to have a “good time.” For that, I’d say go watch Takahata’s other film: the nostalgic, coming-of-age reminisce, Only Yesterday. But don’t expect the same cultural significance. That this film garnered a reputation abroad as the “Japanese Schindler’s List” speaks to its power. And like Schindler’s List, it comes not recommended—but required.

Beautiful, brutal, heart-wrenching, and transcendent, it achieves a catharsis that few live-action films can compete with. As a testament to the supreme mystical quality of animation, it dispels the ludicrous notion that animated films are only for kids. This movie belongs right next to the likes of All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory, The Diary of Anne Frank, and the various other entries by Spielberg, Kubrick, and Eastwood.

Not bad for ink and paint.

Robert Walker is the co-writer for the hit web series The Nostalgia Critic. As a child of the ’80s, he’s been watching anime imports since before he even knew what anime was. Altogether, he has watched over 300 anime series and films. Not necessarily for his job, but because he has a problem.