"Why do fireflies have to die so soon?" Based on the eponymous 1967 semi-autobiographical short story by Akiyuki Nosaka, Studio Ghibli cofounder Isao Takahata's 1988 Japanese animated drama/anti-war film 'Hotaru no Haka' ('Grave of the Fireflies') is, truly, a devastating meditation on the human cost of war. It is one of the most achingly sorrowful and yet profoundly beautiful and haunting works to emerge from Ghibli as well.
Though the opening scene is of a teenage boy named Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi) dying from starvation in a Kobe train station shortly after World War II in 1945, this is just a foretaste of the sadness that is still yet to come.
From here, we see through the means of a flashback of what had occurred some months prior. Seita is charged with the care of his younger sister, Setsuko (Ayano Shiraishi), after an American firebombing during WWII separates the two children from their parents.
Their tale of survival is as heartbreaking as it is true to life. The siblings rely completely on each other and struggle against all odds to stay together...and stay alive.
The film really belongs to little Setsuko, as her brother desperately tries to block or hinder any of the hell around them from her innocent world. Her surprised reaction to when Seita releases an air bubble in her face to her wide eyes and big smile when a gathering of entrapped fireflies are released from a jar, each individually shining among the stars in their dance of freedom amid the night sky as she looks on in wonder, is as entrancing as it is human.
The song Home! Sweet Home! By Sir Henry Rowley Bishop, adapted from American actor and dramatist John Howard Payne's 1823 opera Clari, is used poignantly near the film's end; not once falling into sentimentality.
After Setsuko passes from starvation, hallucinating rocks for balls of rice, a montage is shown of her and Seita from what we had previously seen of what she and her brother endured, but mostly from her point of view.
In seeing this film at my local theater last year due to the film's 30th anniversary (the subtitled version, of course), the ending, as it did to Roger Ebert, moved me to tears.
The inexplicable pain, suffering and agonizing turmoil of the firebombs raining down from the sky in their Nazi-occupied port city, to Seita seeing his mother wrapped from head to toe in bloody bandages to Setsuko's slow passing from the pains of hunger are just some of the disconsolate, hard-to-watch scenes of a WWII film one could ever see.
Animated or not, all of that quickly fades away as we are immersed into this story of two poor individuals fighting a war of their own: survival. Other than being just another disparaging war film, 'Fireflies' also meditates on its consequences as well.
Post viewing, Ebert pointed out, "The characters are typical of much modern Japanese animation, with their enormous eyes, childlike bodies and features of great plasticity [...].
This film proves, if it needs proving, that animation produces emotional effects not by reproducing reality, but by heightening and simplifying it, so that many of the sequences are about ideas, not experiences".
He also mentioned that the film was "An emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation".
Critic Ernest Rister, comparing 'Fireflies' to 'Schindler's List', says, "It is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen."
Though the opening scene is of a teenage boy named Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi) dying from starvation in a Kobe train station shortly after World War II in 1945, this is just a foretaste of the sadness that is still yet to come.
From here, we see through the means of a flashback of what had occurred some months prior. Seita is charged with the care of his younger sister, Setsuko (Ayano Shiraishi), after an American firebombing during WWII separates the two children from their parents.
Their tale of survival is as heartbreaking as it is true to life. The siblings rely completely on each other and struggle against all odds to stay together...and stay alive.
The film really belongs to little Setsuko, as her brother desperately tries to block or hinder any of the hell around them from her innocent world. Her surprised reaction to when Seita releases an air bubble in her face to her wide eyes and big smile when a gathering of entrapped fireflies are released from a jar, each individually shining among the stars in their dance of freedom amid the night sky as she looks on in wonder, is as entrancing as it is human.
The song Home! Sweet Home! By Sir Henry Rowley Bishop, adapted from American actor and dramatist John Howard Payne's 1823 opera Clari, is used poignantly near the film's end; not once falling into sentimentality.
After Setsuko passes from starvation, hallucinating rocks for balls of rice, a montage is shown of her and Seita from what we had previously seen of what she and her brother endured, but mostly from her point of view.
In seeing this film at my local theater last year due to the film's 30th anniversary (the subtitled version, of course), the ending, as it did to Roger Ebert, moved me to tears.
The inexplicable pain, suffering and agonizing turmoil of the firebombs raining down from the sky in their Nazi-occupied port city, to Seita seeing his mother wrapped from head to toe in bloody bandages to Setsuko's slow passing from the pains of hunger are just some of the disconsolate, hard-to-watch scenes of a WWII film one could ever see.
Animated or not, all of that quickly fades away as we are immersed into this story of two poor individuals fighting a war of their own: survival. Other than being just another disparaging war film, 'Fireflies' also meditates on its consequences as well.
Post viewing, Ebert pointed out, "The characters are typical of much modern Japanese animation, with their enormous eyes, childlike bodies and features of great plasticity [...].
This film proves, if it needs proving, that animation produces emotional effects not by reproducing reality, but by heightening and simplifying it, so that many of the sequences are about ideas, not experiences".
He also mentioned that the film was "An emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation".
Critic Ernest Rister, comparing 'Fireflies' to 'Schindler's List', says, "It is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen."
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