I don't cry often at movies. Sentimental tearjerkers like Love Story tend to strike me as unintentionally funny. But one movie that does make me cry is the Japanese animated movie Grave of the Fireflies.
It's a movie about a Japanese brother and sister in World War II whose mother gets killed in a bombing raid and whose naval officer father is missing and probably dead too. They don't get along with their aunt and end up on their own, leading to starvation and death. (This isn't a spoiler: the first scene makes their fate clear.)
I've seen the movie twice and what brings me to tears is the scene near the end, just after the sister's death. The war has just ended, and some people return to their country home and start playing "Home, Sweet Home" on a record. As that music plays we see moments with the sister while she was alive. At that moment I realized that a movie that seemed to be about death was really about life! And that makes me cry.
It's funny how cartoons can get to you emotionally in a way that photography and live action can't manage. Art Spiegelmann understood this when he drew Maus, a comic book based on his father's memories of surviving the Holocaust, showing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.
No comments:
Post a Comment