Kapiolani
Community College Horizons 2001
Kapiolani
Community College
Horizons 2001
Hotaru no Haka ( Grave of the Fireflies) is directed by Isao Takahata and produced by Hiyao Miyazaki, an incredibly prolific movie maker in Japan. With his company, Ghibli Studios, he has directed and/or produced close to 20 animated movies. This particular movie is based on the semiautobiographical book of the same name written by Akiyuki Nosaka. Nosaka wrote this book to come to terms with the death of his sister who died due to malnutrition during World War II. The film tells the story of two children from the port city of Kobe who are made homeless by the fire bombs used by the U.S. military. Seita is a young teenager, and his sister Setsuko is about five. Their father is a commander or some sort of high ranking officer serving on a battleship in the Japanese navy, and their mother is an unfortunate fire bomb casualty. After a string of fire bomb attacks, their town is destroyed and the two children eventually have to go and live with distant relatives. The first shot of the film shows Seita dead in a subway station, and so we can guess Setsuko’s fate. We are then accompanied through flashbacks by the boy’s spirit.
Seita tells a simple tale of survival. The boy and his sister must find a place to stay and food to eat. In wartime their relatives are not kind or generous. Their aunt obviously favors her own children and has absolutely no patience with Setsuko. After weeks of having to listen to how ungrateful he is, Seita brings his mother’s kimonos that he has hidden to his aunt. After their aunt sells their mother’s kimonos for rice, she keeps a lot of it for herself and Seita then realizes it is time to leave. He leaves with his sister to find a place where they can live. Seita comes across an abandoned bomb shelter built in a cave and decides to make their home there. Seita does his best to keep his younger sister happy and for awhile life is as good as it can be during a war. He has some money and can buy food, but during times of war, food is very scarce and hard to come by. As weeks pass, Seita is only encouraged by the idea that eventually his father will return. There is a touching scene where Seita catches handfuls of fireflies for Setsuko and sets them loose inside some mosquito netting. Seeing all of the small lights, Seita recalls the night his father’s ship left for the war. He imagines that the lights from the fireflies are the lights on the ship and the fireworks in the sky. The next scene is just as moving, as it shows Setsuko burying the large pile of now dead fireflies on the following day. She asks her brother why fireflies die so young and then goes back to making her makeshift burial ground.
The defining moment in the movie occurs when Seita overhears that the battleship that his father is commanding has been sunk by the American military and that Japan is losing the war. He then realizes that his father is not coming back, and his situation has become that much more desperate. For weeks, if not months, Seita had been believing that eventually his father would come home and everything would be all right. Seita had his hands full taking care of Setsuko, as she had been having diarrhea and her body was covered with rash. Not being able to eat decent food had taken a toll on the five-year-old girl.
Knowing now that his father would not be coming back, Seita takes out the last of his money and searches desperately for food to buy for his sister. He is able to buy a pumpkin and some meat, but by this time it is too late. That night Setsuko dies in her sleep, her small body withered away by malnutrition. In the final act, the spirits of Seita and Setsuko just look at you through the screen and it makes you think of everything that you have just seen.
I found this movie to be excellent for many reasons including the fact that it shows the war from a different standpoint. So many Hollywood war movies portray the Americans fighting for liberty and justice, but they rarely show shots of what actually happened to the people on the receiving end of that justice. With the use of firebombs, American planes were able to wipe out entire towns of wooden homes. This movie shows just how devastating the bombings were. Obviously, the Japanese had their hand in the war too, and did their own share of horrible war atrocities, but seeing how wars affect innocent children is heartbreaking.
When Seita and Setsuko begin to live in their old bomb shelter, it is hard to believe that they once lived in rather elegant surroundings. The movie shows this in typical anime fashion. Instead of telling you that they used to be rich, there is a flash back to when Seita and Setsuko are eating shave ice on the beach during the summer. In Japan, during the 1940s, only a privileged few would be able to afford ice in the summertime. Also, many times when Seita asks Setsuko what she would like to eat, she mentions delicacies like tempura, tonkatsu, ikura and uni, food that the average family would not be able to afford.
What saddened me the most was the fact that deaths like those portrayed in movie were not uncommon during the war. Innocent lives were cut short by a war that they had nothing to do with. Akiyuki Nosaka spent many years after the war regretting the fact that he had not saved his sister in some way or even died her. I cannot imagine anything more horrible then seeing a young child, especially your sister, literally wither away in front of you.
I highly recommend this movie. The subtitled format is better. I watched both the Japanese language and English dubbed version, and a lot gets lost in the translation in the dubbed version. In the subtitled version the phrases are translated rather literally. Ñ And make sure you have a box of tissues ready.
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