GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES: Pangs

This review was requested by Alexis Howland. Many thanks to Alexis for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Isao Takahata
Writer: Isao Takahata
Cast: Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi
Runtime: 89 mins.
1988

Whether Grave of the Fireflies is a movie for you depends on your relationship to escapism. If you watch movies to escape grim reality, you'll want to stay far away from Grave. The film is itself interested in escapism as a subject, but this takes the form of demonstrating with full force the unflinching, brutal reality that lurks behind blessed moments of escape. To put it bluntly, this is a film that spends its entire runtime showing you two children dying of starvation in wartime Japan, and it is physically emotionally and spiritually convincing. Only you can know whether that's something you should experience.

As for me, I am always seeking movies that can make me feel anything, even if that feeling is discomfort or outright despair. Grave presents a rich and multifaceted despair, to the point that it's hard to know exactly what to say about it. Yes, the movie succeeds in exploring miserable territory, and yes, it hurts. The experience is so worthwhile because that's not all the film does; it uses its exploration of misery to pinpoint an important conundrum of the human spirit. In our times of greatest misery, we can find true expressions of love and care to anchor us.

The centerpiece symbol, the firefly, speaks to this push/pull. It is a flexible symbol, alternately representing hope, play, artillery, death, and stars. The firefly is foregrounded in one of the film's most important scenes. Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi) and Setsuko (Ayano Shiraishi), a young boy and his little sister, have lost their mother to a firebombing at the tail end of World War II. Their father is a Navy man, likely dead, whose absence hangs over the entire film. After uncomfortably lodging with a jealous and unstable aunt, they strike out on their own. The country's resources are scarce, and the adults they encounter are either impotent or antagonistic. They end up lodging in a sort of artificial cave by a river. When it gets dark, the tiny Setsuko is no longer excited by the novelty of their new digs. She feels small and afraid. So Seita sets up mosquito netting, captures a bunch of fireflies, and releases them as an ad hoc nightlight. It's a magical, heartwarming, deeply human moment that is gutted the following morning. Seita wakes to find Setsuko burying the insects that have died in the night, and in this heartbreaking instant Seita learns that Setsuko has figured out of her own accord that Mom is dead and buried. He had been protecting her all this time for nothing.

The film has two central emotional registers, joy and despair, and they are both represented in the title by 'fireflies' and 'grave' respectively. What keeps Grave of the Fireflies from being garden variety miserabilism is its commitment to exploring the complexity of that dynamic. As in Hegelian dialectics, where truth issues not from certainty but contradiction, joy and despair are portrayed here less as separate arenas of emotion and more as two sides of the same coin. The fireflies lighting up the darkness before dying shows us that there is despair embedded in wonder, and the catharsis that happens at their grave shows us that there is comfort in despair.

The film is intellect-proof, so let's not venture too far into the philosophical reading. Instead let's turn to aesthetics, where we find a cornucopia of wonders. Grave of the Fireflies is one of the standout animated films of the 1980's for good reason-- it may be one of the best-looking animated films of all time. The style isn't flashy. It's simple, regular almost, approaching realism enough to create a sense of normalcy. This normalcy is its greatest weapon and central to its themes, as Seita lies, hustles, and sacrifices everything to bestow upon his sister some modicum of ritual and regularity. The simple animation style allows for an intimate attention to detail, with every grin and grimace communicating so much about these characters' hidden internal worlds, kept secret from each other and often from themselves.

The perspective remains locked to the hip of our protagonist, but each little moment is so pregnant with meaning that the film starts to feel mythic in a way that extends beyond Seita. We see this in the tiniest expressive gestures, as when Setsuko is told that she cannot see her mother in the hospital. She stands very still beneath the blue sky, then wraps her arms around herself and begins slowly rotating back and forth. This physicality is so communicative about the particular state of this little girl in this exact moment, but it also takes on the enormity of representing all people who suddenly come to terms with separation from a loved one.

So many stories of World War II are steeped in the vulgar miserabilism mentioned above, but Grave avoids any such pitfall by crafting every moment with care. The characters, performed by actual children, intimately represent children's concerns. The atrocities they endure are always presented with deep, throbbing empathy rather than gawking amusement. The environments feel so lived in that their destruction is like the death of another person. And the food. Nothing is more eye-popping and tantalizingly animated than the food. This is another brilliant and devastating creative choice: the food must look delicious so that its absence is dearly felt.

This is a project that could easily go so wrong in so many ways. Rather than softening the approach, director Isao Takahata instead runs headlong into the obstacles so courageously and virtuosically that for the entirety of the runtime, the audience is too captivated to consider all of the worse versions that might have come to pass in less responsible hands.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS