Fireflies

I’m a fan of anime.  One of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen is the 1988 animated Japanese movie Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Isao Takahata for the famous Studio Ghibli.  It’s about a Japanese boy and his little sister struggling through World War II.  Their mother was killed in a bombing raid, and their father, an officer in the disintegrating Japanese navy, is probably dead too.  Then they live with their aunt, but she scolds them for being parasites and pride eventually drives the boy to leave with the girl and try to survive on their own, making a home in a cave.  The movie makes it clear at the beginning that they’ll die, so that isn’t a spoiler.  (At times we see the boy’s ghost.)

All this sounds grim, and a lot of it is.  But it’s all the details that make it compelling. (The title comes from a scene where the girl collects fireflies in the night, but the next day they’re dead so she buries them.) There’s a scene near the end set to the song “Home, Sweet Home” that brings me to tears, because at this point I see that a movie that seemed to be about death is really about life, not unlike the famous Japanese movie Ikiru.

It’s based on a 1967 short story by Akiyuki Nosata, who was a boy in the hungry times in 1940s Japan whose little sister died.  (He must have felt a certain “survivor’s guilt.”)

This sort of story is more effectively told in animation than it could be in live action.  When we see photographs or films of the horrors of war, we instinctively keep an emotional distance from what we’re seeing, like when we look directly into the sun and our cornea naturally closes.  Drawings somehow get around this.  Another example is Maus, Art Spiegelmann’s comic book telling the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Nazi holocaust, with Jews shown as mice and Nazis as cats.

I’m grateful to Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert for first exposing me to the film on their movie review show!