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Abstract:
This document is the script for a ``Talk Geek To Me'' podcast episode, and covers a review of the Japanese Anime "Grave of the Fireflies."
``Grave of the Fireflies'' is the 1988 Anime based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Akiyuki Nosaka called, in Japanese, ``Hotaru no Haka.'' This novel won the prestigious Naoki Prize in 1968, which is kind of like winning the Pulitzer Prize here in the US. To the best of my knowledge, there is no English translation of the novel, only a Spanish one.
This Anime is the story of what happens to a pair of war orphans named Seita and Setsuko, after they lose their parents in the Kobe Firebombings. Seita is a boy in his early teens and must care for his four or five year old sister, Setsuko.
The novel starts with the death of the Seita in the 1940's, and uses as a main plot device his ghost recounting the story of the last few years of his life. The movie then immediately flashes back to Kobe, just before the first fire bombing raid.
For those of you who may not know about these fire bombings, toward the end of of WW2, General Curtis LeMay was disappointed in the results of attempting to bomb specific targets in Japan. Convinced that Japan's domestic defenses would cost an unacceptable amount of casualties in an invasion, he commenced with a massive burning of Japanese cities in a campaign of demoralization that was similar in strategy to the destruction of Atlanta, Georgia, a major transportation hub, during the American Civil War.
B-29 bombers then began raiding Japanese cities. They dropped M-69s. This incendiary weapon weighed six pounds and were dropped in clusters of 38 per container. A B-29 usually carried 37 of these containers, resulting in just over 1,400 bombs per plane. The bombs were dropped from 5,000 feet with a time fuse, and exploded on contact with the ground. The fiery jelly-petroleum compound would merely spread when people attempted to extinguish them with water. The effect on the wood and paper housing at that time and era in Japan was devastating.
Back in the Anime, Seita takes charge of Setsuko to get her to the bomb shelter, but never makes it. Later, he goes to a first aid station at a bombed out school and discovers his mother was injured. The sight of her is horrendous, as nearly her whole body is bandaged due to massive burns, and she dies that night.
Seita then takes his little sister to an aunts house, and while she takes them in, they feel particularly unwelcome there. After many attempts to make the situation work, Seita gives up, deciding instead to squat in an abandoned bomb shelter with his sister.
Initially, foraging seems to work for the children, but eventually Seita realizes it just isn't enough, and then resorts to looting, during future bombings. Since he is looting, selling, and attempting to buy food for his sister. This strategy works for a while.
Then, the system of food rationing means stricter privations for these siblings, and Seita turns to outright theft of food from local farmers.
However, our young man is just child, and proves unable to fend for his little sister, who begins to starve. Eventually, he watches his sister die, and must take care of performing her cremation.
The last scene of the animated film shows the ghosts of Seita and Setsuko, no longer in the rags and emaciated state of starving war orphans, but restored to better times, looking down upon the modern city of Kobe as we know it today.
I freely admit that my one page or so introduction does not do justice to this Anime. The plot itself, nor the technology of destruction behind the bombings is not the point.
The point is understanding on an emotional level what this kind of war victimization means.
As such, what is it to take in an Anime on a pair of war orphans starving? This film is often understood as an anti war film. Here, war is no two brave ideologies duking it out, here, war is an illness causing the most cruel form of privations: poverty, vagrancy, sickness unto starvation and death.
And yet, the fact that it is an anime, makes it strike home even more. There has been a live action version in Japan, but that came later in 2005 and does not yet seem to be available in English. But I wonder if it would impact me as much. I imagine a live action film would focus on the realism of the images of cities being burnt to the ground, and images of a little girl passing away. I would imagine that the photographic realism would tend to distract one away from what was going on.
Anime allows what I like to call an ``impressionistic'' interpretation of things. I'm not just talking about the fact that the style of art can change in an Anime, to include panned still scenes that approach the style of impressionism: even though that is part of it too. My mother, a portrait artist, always explained to me that she would feel insulted if anybody ever said that one of her portraits was ``as good as a picture.'' The portrait, my mother explained, was an art form meant to flatter the subject. That here it was the artist's job to interpret the best features of the subject.
If you remove the concept of flattery from this idea, you see the meaning. The artist need not merely flatter, he gets the high privilege of choosing what needs to be emphasized.
This choice of emphasis should not be confused with a traditional Japanese form of emphasis on day to day situations. One of the reasons that Japanese books and movies have such a different feel to them than American works is because there is a tradition of emphasizing the routine of day to day life, and this in turn emphasizes the disruption of routine by whatever happens in the plot. So, when watching an anime, or reading a translation of a Japanese text, you notice that there is emphasis on day to day living that normally does not appear in American works. When this technique is used in this war film, I find that you get this odd rhythm. Normalcy is disrupted by the fire bombings. A new normalcy is established in domestic living with their aunt, to have that disrupted by their having to leave that situation. Then a new normalcy of living as squatters, only to have that terminated by the final disruption, death itself.
Something I learned about is what is sometimes called a ``hinge'' moment. That is something I learned about Haiku poetry, which is very terse, three line poems. (Their meter does not translate well,) but in this traditional three verse poem, there is usually a verse that is sometimes an ``aha'' moment. Like this: something happens, now it is spring, and the same thing is happening, but differently because it is spring. I don't have a readily available example from classic Japanese haiku, but I do have one from a favorite anti Microsoft piece of ``computer geek haiku.''
Here, the ``Hinge'' in the action is the third verse, it identifies the fickleness some have experienced with the Windows operating system. The action, which it is working, then it is not working, is modified by the third verse that points to that situation as being a hallmark of the Windows experience.It worked yesterday,
It doesn't work today,
Windows is like that sometimes.
In the Anime at hand, this takes the form of Seita doing an audio voice over. The movie starts with one, ``such and such is the date I died.'' This emphases Kobe with me, and Kobe without me. ``She never awoke again,'' this emphasizes life with a sister, and life without one. The fact that I did not see such a hinge statement around other key events, like the mother passing, or the realization that the father has passed, or the realization that we lost the war, serves to emphasis that these events are less important that the first two mentioned. Yet, they don't hit you in the face with it, it is an emphasis by way of being subtle, and I believe this to be a subtlety that only could be possible in Japanese literature, with it's emphasis on rhythm, hinge statements, and routine (and the disruption thereof,) can only touch.
The scene from which the movie derives it's title forms a recurring theme to the picture. Squatting in the shelter, the brother figures out how to illuminate their shelter with fireflies, which the sister greatly enjoys. In the very next scene, you see Setsuko burying the fireflies, and she says ``they need to be in a grave, like mommy is.'' In itself, a heart wrenching scene, but it is deeper.
Fireflies lead notably short lives, of only two or three weeks, and therefore are symbols of impermanence. The effect of this floating nights in the sky is also held to be symbolic of the souls of those who passed away lingering on, sometimes amongst us. Setsuko makes another firefly statement, upon watching a kamikaze fighter fly, she says ``the plane looks like a firefly.''
This is interesting because of the fact that the children themselves can be understood as short lived souls. As such, the title ``Grave of the Fireflies'' can not only be understood as the scene of the little girl burying the fireflies, but as the tale of the short lived brother and sister on their way to their graves, but lingering amongst us as ghosts.