Movie Review – Grave of the Fireflies

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
Written and directed by Isao Takahata

Not all the horrors in Japan were the result of the two atomic bombings. What gets less coverage in U.S. history books are the ongoing firebombings of civilian areas. The same B-29s that would eventually drop the horrid nuclear weapon would also drop standard bombs and burn neighborhoods to the ground, creating orphans and widows. What made this so much worse was the fascist stance of the society. There was some community, but certainly not the level needed for people to recover. Whereas now we can see those who still survive in Gaza keep hope alive by caring for one another, these sentiments were not nearly as widespread in imperial Japan. Some people even found it within themselves to walk by dying children and not think to help them.

A young man sits on the ground, slumped against a pillar in a train station. People rush by him. If they give him attention, it is to scoff at how “lazy” he is. Eventually, the boy dies there on the ground. His spirit comes across the spirit of a little girl. They are surrounded by fireflies who usher them to a train that will carry them into the next life. The boy reflects on what brought them to this point.

In March 1945, the city of Kobe was almost entirely destroyed by B-29 bombers. Seita and Setsuko, are a brother and sister whose father is serving in the Japanese Navy. They lose their home and their mother in this attack. The siblings must move in with a distant aunt who is lukewarm to them at first but quickly bristles as she sees them as a burden on her household. Eventually, she accuses the children of leeching off her, so Seita takes Setsuko to live in an abandoned bomb shelter. This new home doesn’t provide them with the shelter from the elements they need. The fireflies from the nearby swamp offer them a little light in the evenings. Eventually, Setsuko becomes sick, and Seita desperately tries to do what he can to save her. He can’t. The world turns. Cruelty subsists.

Because the film opens with the main character’s death and his reunion with his little sister’s spirit, it preemptively informs us this is going to be a bleak, devastating story. So many films would use the death of Setsuko as a shock, but here, it is treated with dignity by putting it front & center. Isao Takahata changes the source novel’s opening (the death of the children’s mother) by putting this information about their fates at the start. There will be no emotional manipulation through plot twists. We know how this ends, and the film is about understanding how it got to that point. 

Takahata is a co-founder of Studio Ghibli and an artist who doesn’t get as much attention as his colleague Hayao Miyazaki. That makes sense, as Miyazaki’s projects primarily drove Ghibli’s output. Takahata served as the director on Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, My Neighbors the Yamadas, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. If you have seen any of these, especially the last two, you’ll notice how different the filmmaker’s style & tone is from Miyazaki’s. Takahata has cited the French New Wave directors as some of his biggest influences, especially Jean-Luc Goddard. The French animator Paul Grimault also significantly influenced the Japanese director. Grimault produced gorgeously complex short animated films from the 1940s to the 1980s. A Takahata film feels very different from Miyazaki’s work, and it makes sense that he made Grave rather than his more prestigious co-founder.

It might seem natural to claim Grave of the Fireflies is an anti-war film. However, according to Takahata, that was not the intention of the picture. Instead, he sees it as a meditation on the image of the brother & sister, separated from society and suffering as a result. He aimed to provoke sympathy, especially among teens and young adults who saw the picture. It makes sense as Grave doesn’t go into much detail about the war; it is simply happening in the background. Takahata was an anti-war advocate but did critique works like Barefoot Gen. He simply didn’t believe that the creation of art that depicted suffering in such detail would ever do anything to stop aggression on the part of governments. He saw Japanese society as unchanged since his youth, still adhering to so many of the conformist, fascist values that brought them into the World War.

Takahata made it clear that his choice to show the characters are dead at the start was to “protect the audience from heartbreak.” He stated, “ I try to lessen an audience’s pain by revealing everything at the beginning.” What is most surprising is that he sees Seita’s withdrawal from society as the worst decision in the picture. It is what leads to Setsuko’s death and the boy’s own. It is a natural response to want to move away when the society you live in has become so rife with cruelty & hatred. 

But Takahata is correct that this distance does nothing to push back against the core problem. It just ends in tragedy. No one who was so vicious & nasty to the children learned anything from their deaths. They might have learned something had Seita fought back and demanded to be treated with dignity. That is the sentiment the filmmaker wanted to inspire in the young people watching the movie – do not retreat; fight for the world you know you and your community deserve. Seita’s nationalistic pride is what leads to his sister’s death, and the film makes it ambiguous as to whether he realizes this or not. He is a teenage boy, so perhaps he can’t think in such complex terms yet. But the audience should understand this.

How does this fit in with our other films about the atomic bombing of Japan? One of the things that helps us understand why the attacks were so devastating was that there was no social cohesion at the degree Japan needed. They lost the war for many of the same reasons the Confederacy lost in the U.S. Civil War. If your ideology is centered on extreme individualism and upholding hierarchies of power, then you will not have the bonds needed to handle devastation. The Self has to be pushed aside to make way for the Collective, and in this way, everyone is provided for. It is not the fault of the Japanese that they were bombed with such a disgusting, obscene weapon. I think Takahata would agree, though, that it was the fault of the Japanese that they had no community to engage in healing and working through trauma. 

It makes me think about the United States, a society steeped in fascist ideology. For now, their bloated military spending and geographical isolation have protected the nation. I expect it will persist for many generations to come. However, one day, the U.S. will fall, and we must wonder what society will be like at that moment. Will the fascism embedded in every institution still be just as potent? If it is, then mass death will be the inevitable outcome as it will be every person for themselves. 

We still haven’t come to terms with our genocide of Indigenous people or the chattel slavery/Jim Crow laws we subjected Black people to. We perpetuate these hatreds in the way we talk about refugees who have come to the imperial core after hearing about how much better it is for generations. We see it in how we marginalize the disabled. We see it in how we turn a blind eye to the genocide of Palestinian people. At some point, there will be a generation that watches its children die like the ones in this film. Will they be prepared for that moment to fully embrace humanity, or will they devolve into animals fighting over crumbs?