Isao Takahata’s least hopeful movie allows its audience to experience a piece of the inaccessible lives of those devastated by warfare.
After a heart-palpitating air raid, the image of Seita’s mom on her evocative deathbed is a powerfully stark one. We had seen her just moments before, escaping the home along with Seita and Setsuko, before being abruptly hit with the dark visual of her lying there, a casualty in the making. We don’t know her, nor do we really know our main characters yet, but the basic human understanding of tragedy overcomes that unfamiliarity, and it enters among the most haunting images in the film.
And it just keeps going. The screech of the air raid siren. The spectacle of looming flocks of warplanes. Their aunt’s lecture. 3 tomatoes. Setsuko on the floor. Takahata pounds these moments into the film without warning, often immediately after moments of joyful whimsy. When you walk into the film, you expect such horror to be prominent given the reputation it carries with it, but not immediately after you’re distracted by our characters’ discovery of the simple joys of life. This effect could be interpreted as emotionally manipulative, though I wouldn’t be that cynical about it; those moments reflect the shock of actual emotional developments, and the subsequent devastation that’s enhanced by their suddenness.
Takahata argues Grave of the Fireflies isn’t an anti-war film. I disagree. In parallel with the obvious atrocities that occur from incendiary bombings on the towns travelled to by our main character, there are frequent critical exhibitions of the imperialist sentiments expressed by the Japanese public, and their conformity with labour exploitation due to pressure in wartime. Though these messages are conveyed by intensely sympathizing with a young brother and sister who’ve isolated themselves from society, the underlying themes still present themselves emotionally and seem all too clear to anyone keen on recognizing the content of the film’s text. Besides, Takahata considers himself against war in his own life, alongside Miyazaki, and has expressed his steadfast support for Article 9; a clause in the Constitution of Japan that disallows war as a means to settle international disputes of the state. To interpret it as anything but an anti-war film would probably lead you to jumping through more than a few argumentative hoops, but the distinction is ultimately arbitrary; the relationship between the two main characters is what grounds it.
Those characters, main and otherwise, are the primary focus and highlight of the film; I would argue they’re even stronger than the animation. The childrens’ caretaker and distant aunt is, of course, the most present besides Seita and Setsuko, but consequently the strongest when excluding those two. She’s introduced in a compassionate light, and in a Miyazaki tale, it would be expected that she would remain benevolent throughout the runtime, akin to Granny in My Neighbour Totoro. Under Takahata’s direction however, characters are not instilled with these humanistic values; she snaps at Seita after his reassurance of Setsuko, leading into a tirade about their entitlement she’d been bottling up inside. Her nationalistic sentiments and disdain for Seita’s idleness is representative of the Japanese mentalities both during World War II, and (in Takahata’s opinion) the modern day.
But as is clear to anyone who’s seen it, the character dynamic between Seita and Setsuko by far steals the show. Seita’s consistent efforts to preserve the innocence of his sister are incredibly heartbreaking to see go unfulfilled by her maturing; her admission that she knows of her mother’s death is particularly afflicting for both the audience and Seita, who breaks down at the reminder and at the realization of his sister’s grief. It brings us back to the evocative image of the bed an hour before, and shoves us right back into that dour headspace. Such a small moment is simple in its emotional storytelling, but no less effective.
At the same time, the two are capable of greatly heartfelt chemistry, a personal favourite example of mine being a particular sequence with the candy tin, which is told almost entirely with Ghibli’s poetic visual storytelling. As they walk along the beaten path outside the village, Setsuko starts wailing, stopping dead in her tracks, staunchly unwilling to cooperate like any child in her age range. To calm her, Seita helps her form a makeshift rattle out of the tin, which keeps her peaceful for the most part. However, it’s in the following shot where his true compassion lies; he fills up the tin with tap water, and though Setsuko is at first confused, the moment he demonstrates the superior sound from its rattling, she taps her feet in excitement, letting out a whispered but eager “Let me!” I rewound this moment a couple of times; I couldn’t help but be filled with her same childish giddiness.
Then again, the emotionally dismal peak of the film puts a steady end to that as well. Whether it’s at the film’s opening death scene, or the moment her rash crops up, or right after the doctor mentions malnutrition, at some point, the audience realizes that Setsuko isn’t going to make it. Takahata creates an expectation for the audience with repeated foreshadowing and teasing, and has them waiting… for a child to die. It’s the cruelty of this death’s reality that permits it to be so horrifically powerful in its emotion, and so much greater in emotional weight than any visual of millions of deaths occurring at once. Its preventability is precisely what crushes Seita in turn, and the liability he can’t accept even until his own starvation brings only more tragedy to these predictably tragic lives.
Some critics have taken issue with Seita’s eventual starvation due to what they perceive as a lack of due consequence (through decades of unavoidable guilt) for his responsibility in his sister’s death. This, I find, misses the point in multiple ways. The main narrative focus of the original short story (a semi-autobiographical drama by Akiyuki Nosaka) is, indeed, the author’s apology for his responsibility in leading his adopted sister to her death, and in Takahata’s vision, this same culpability is taken for Seita, and though he is potentially victimized more than he should be (albeit far less than his sister), and his ensuing starvation certainly deprives him of the moral wrestling later in life (an emotional grappling that, needless to say, the original author experienced in considerable form), his guilt is still accounted for within the confines of the narrative, and his actions are explicitly deemed guiltworthy by the subjective perspective of the events.
Nonetheless, the subtext Takahata finds in this tale amounts to compelling resonance. If he considers this to be the story of a failed life of two children isolated from society, then the message is clear; the strict barriers of society are so rigid that to step out of them only guarantees your end. There’s a compliance with exploitation that’s facilitated during the stress of war, one that’s so massively enforced that any attempt to withdraw from the constricting system is vain and death-harbouring. It would be easy to pass this film off as weltering misery porn, satisfied with its own morose importance, desperate to break people’s spirits without any strength of character, but to do so would be to ignore the essential value (both in social criticism and in historical basis) it carries under the emotional martyrdom. The film bears significance under the surface (dis)pleasures, and its efficacy in filtering it through the lens of merciless suffering only exposes that significance further. Grave of the Fireflies is a brutally beautiful film, and its aversion to pulling any punches enters it among the greatest films cinema has to offer.
