Recently I saw that Grave of the Fireflies had just come to Netflix. I'd been meaning to check out some Studio Ghibli films and I had heard that Grave of the Fireflies was really well regarded, so last week I watched it.
It was incredible.
It was also perhaps the most moving and utterly devastating piece of media I have ever seen. I honestly had a hard time getting through it emotionally and I was not ok for several days afterwards. Even writing this has been a challenge.
I would absolutely recommend it, with the caveat that it is a haunting, crushing experience.
Background
Grave of the Fireflies is a 1988 anime film adaptation of a 1967 semi-autobiographical short story of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka. The story is set in Kobe, Japan in the waning days of World War II and follows the boy Seita and his little sister Setsuko, aged approximately 14 and 4 respectively. The film was written and directed by Isao Takahata and produced by Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation company that went on to produce My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and many others.
There's not a whole lot of plot to spoil, but I will be giving what I called "craft spoilers" in my Macbeth film discussion, so if you want an unvarnished experience, maybe watch the film and come back later.
The film opens with Seita dying in a subway terminal. His ghost appears and walks outside to find the ghost of Setsuko surrounded by fireflies. They walk back into the train station and the film flashes back to the war, beginning with the firebombing of Seita and Setsuko's neighborhood by American bombers. The story follows their struggle, and ultimate failure, to survive the deprivations of 1945 Japan.
A Note about Translation:
Like with Throne of Blood, I can't figure out who translated the streaming version of the film and I'm salty on principle about it. I did find a fan transcript that is occasionally more flowery than the one I saw but, unlike in Throne of Blood, spot checking it against the subtitles didn't really reveal any big differences like the ones I talked about in my Throne of Blood piece.
All that to say, I can't really comment on the provenance or "faithfulness" of the Netflix subtitles.
Some Generalities
The animation used very realistic environments and fairly conventional cinematic technique and framings. To put it crudely (and patronizingly), it looks like a "real" film. Setsuko is more cartoony, with huge expressive eyes and a small nose and mouth, and the contrast with the rest of the world and its characters highlights her wide eyed innocence. Seita is drawn more realistically, though he still is kind of a bridge between the adults and Setsuko.
The ghosts and their immediate environs are tinged a muted red; the color is neither threatening nor angry but it immediately sets them apart in an otherwise realistic setting.
Grave of the Fireflies is a rather quiet movie, which is kind of a bonkers thing to say about a film where air raid sirens frequently go off, but the long stretches of silence and nature sounds make the din of the war feel like a disruptive intrusion rather than a constant background noise. Largely because of this I felt myself tensing up every time a siren went off. Not every air raid siren led to an actual bombing and this uncertainty only heightened the tension.
The score is rather minimal, really only being present when Seita and Setsuko are playing together. In these moments the score is, like so much of the imagery and scenery, idyllic and beautiful. The film is content to use ambient sounds as a de facto score, establishing mood with the patter of rain or birdsong and the bursts of danger aren't emphasized by musical cues but by the drone of air planes, sirens, and crackling flames.
The film also makes great use of stillness and isn't afraid to hold on a shot for a long time. Craft Spoiler incoming.
Probably the most heart wrenching example of this is right after Setsuko dies of malnourishment in the empty bomb shelter/cave they've made their home. The only sound is the wind of the storm outside and the movie holds on a still image close up of Seita cradling Setsuko's body against him in the dark for almost 20 seconds. It's just the dazed, hollowed out stillness of grief while the wind howls.
Overall, Grave of the Fireflies has a deeply poignant and elegiac atmosphere, punctuated by moments of panic and grief.
Ambiguity and Engagement
Probably the single thing I found the most interesting and effective about this film was the ambiguity of it. There's just not very much guidance on what the viewer is "supposed to" take from all of this.
There's no explicit moralizing here. (I use that word in a neutral sense.) The politics of the war never really comes up. Some characters make off-hand reference to the goodness of serving the glory of the Empire but there's no real rejection of this like in, say, Godzilla Minus One where Dr. Noda says before the final confrontation:
This country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats. And finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That’s why this time I’d take pride in a citizen-led effort that sacrifices no lives at all!
There's not really any overt criticisms of the United States, either. No Americans appear in person; they're just an impersonal force occasionally flying overhead and dropping incendiaries.
This absence of explicit politics makes sense as the movie is a deeply personal story and very strongly from a fourteen year old's perspective but it was a little surprising.
The way the film uses its main character also adds to the ambiguity. Grave of the Fireflies has an explicit framing narrative with Seita's ghost, but there is no voiceover telling the audience what he feels or thinks about the events we're witnessing. If an animated character can be said to give a performance, Seita's is rather understated with very little exposition so you have to intuit his inner world from his reactions and the subtleties of his facial animation.
Ghost Seita only appears very briefly throughout the film and has only four lines of dialog. The very first line of the film is his "On the night of September 21, 1945, I died" but he does not speak again until very near the end when Setsuko dies. He says "Setsuko never woke up" and later "The next morning I put Setsuko's ashes in the fruit drops tin and left the mountain. I never went to the cave again." Neither of these lines is necessary exposition, as you would absolutely be able to tell what is going on without them, but having him speak here makes his preceding silence feel purposeful.
Ghost Seita could speak to the audience if he wanted to, but he doesn't. He's being withholding which is part of the reason I think this film stuck with me so much. Having no real guidance from Seita centers the experience on the viewer's response. I wasn't passively receiving what Seita thought about all of this; the film was inviting me to engage with my own emotional reaction.
There's a small moment right at the end that really emphasizes this. After Seita cremates Setsuko's body the scene fades to muted red and Seita morphs into his own ghost sitting on a park bench. Setsuko's ghost calls his name and runs up to him and he gently and affectionately tells her "It's late. Go to sleep." After she lays down on his leg, with the poignant and beautiful score in the background, for a moment Seita looks directly at the camera. He says nothing, but holds his gaze for a few seconds before looking away and the camera cuts to show that they are on a bench in the present day overlooking the modern city of Kobe before the credits roll.
What this silent fourth wall break is meant to say is an exercise for the viewer. Is it an accusation? If taken that way, what the accusation is would depend on who you are. My response as an American would probably be quite different than that of it's original Japanese audience. Is it cautionary? Imploring? Or maybe it's a simple "We just wanted to live" and there's nothing else to say.
I have a hard time putting into words how affecting this was, this moment where I made eye contact with this boy who I'd been watching struggle through an impossible situation and who died alone and in anonymity. There was no one but me to even mourn his passing.
I count all this ambiguity as a strength and not a weakness. It all comes down to intent, really. Accidental ambiguity through clumsiness or isnt-this-deep-man ambiguity through pretentiousness are annoying, but purposeful thematic ambiguity can be, and in this case was, very powerful.
The Fireflies
The most conspicuous image in the film is, not shockingly, that of fireflies. When Seita first sees Setsuko's ghost at the very beginning, she is surrounded by fireflies. Seita and Setsuko's direct personal connection to fireflies only becomes clear later when he catches some to amuse her.
There is a touching beauty to the scene where Seita gathers fireflies to light up the shelter/cave they are living in. The two of them sit in the darkness, quietly marveling at these living stars that envelope them. It has both aesthetic beauty and the emotional beauty of the bond between the siblings. The fireflies are Seita's gift to Setsuko and the whole scene is a testament to delighted childhood whimsy. (I myself have fond and clear memories of catching fireflies at my grandparents' house as a young child.)
This all makes the scene the following day when Setsuko is burying the now dead fireflies even more poignant. "Why do fireflies have to die so soon?" she says.
I very much like how the fireflies are not an easy one to one allegory for anything. They could be interpreted as being metaphors for childhood in general, or Setsuko in specific, the comforts of nature in an age of mechanized war, etc.
When Setsuko is burying the fireflies, Seita has a silent and extremely quick flashback (the only one in the film) to his mother's burned body being tossed into a mass grave. So the fireflies are also suggestive of the fragility of life in general.
The way the fireflies move through the frame is also visually similar to how the firebombs fall from the American planes, and how the ash from destroyed buildings and Setsuko's cremation drift and swirl around Seita. Setsuko also comments that a kamikaze plane flying overhead looks like a firefly.
Dan Olsen, in his video essay "The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall" says this about metaphor and symbolism: "Abstraction is counterintuitively very efficient. It allows a movie to be about a lot of things simultaneously by letting symbols bleed into one another."
This density of potential meanings and a lack of explicit guidance is a real strength and is in keeping with the thematic ambiguity of the rest of the film. Similar to Seita's look directly at the camera, on some level the film is asking you what you think the fireflies mean.
Also, one last thing I came across while doing some background research is that in the Japanese title of the film, Hotaru no Haka, the word "hotaru" (firefly) is not written with the usual kanji character for firefly, but from two other characters that when combined make the same sound. The two characters are "fire" and "drop." So even the fireflies in the title can have multiple vectors of meaning, being evocative of the incendiary bombs dropped on Japan.
"Home Sweet Home"
Big craft spoiler for the film's climax incoming.
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The film's biggest sledgehammer hits when Setsuko dies of malnourishment and from this scene until the end credits the movie is crushing and almost overwhelming in its grief.
After Seita buys the coal he needs to cremate his sister, the film transitions to a sequence that is unusual in that it's one of the only ones that Seita is not physically present for. In the bucolic and lovely environs of the siblings' shelter home, the locals are excitedly returning to their houses. The war is over and they're safe now. One of them plays a record of the achingly beautiful "Home Sweet Home," sung by Italian soprano Amelita Galli-Curuci.
The song plays over vignettes of Setsuko in and around the shelter home, where she plays and giggles, fading in and out of the landscape. Seita is neither present in these vignettes nor is he shown observing them. This makes it a little unclear whether these are his memories of her, or if the film itself is remembering her, like the details of her life were beautiful and important regardless of whether anyone else was present.
The lyrics of the song are:
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roamBe it ever so humble, there's no place like homeA charm from the skies seems to hallow us thereWhich seek thro' the world, is ne'er met elsewhereHome! Home!Sweet, sweet home!There's no place like homeThere's no place like home!An exile from home splendor dazzles in vainOh give me my lowly thatched cottage againThe birds singing gaily that came at my callAnd gave me the peace of mind dearer than allHome, home, sweet, sweet homeThere's no place like home, there's no place like home!
I highly recommend listening to this version of the song, see the link here. The lyrics of "Home Sweet Home" were written by the American writer John Howard Payne and the melody was written by English composer Henry Bishop. I think it's an interesting that they chose an American song here. I don't think they translated it for the Japanese audience either; there were no Japanese subtitles on screen for it.
Like most of the decisions in this film, the use of this song, in addition to being heart wrenching on its own, provides a lot to consider.
Gallimaufry
We don't see what happens to Seita after Setsuko's funeral, so the very brief scene of his death at the very beginning is all we get. Presumably it's hunger and malnourishment but at the end of the day, it isn't really relevant. He didn't make it, and that's all that matters.
Seita and Setsuko's relationship was really well drawn. It was obvious they cared about and loved each other. Setsuko was a realistically written four year old and this is partially why this film hit me so hard, as at the time of viewing my son was also four and it was hard not to see him in Setsuko.
The last thing Seita says in this world is "Setsuko." Her last words, when Seita brings her the watermelon she's too weak to eat, are "Thank you." This is the only time she says this in the film, so in addition to the immediate sense (i.e. thanks for the watermelon) it takes on the additional sense of "Thank you...for everything."
I like that at the beginning you don't know the full significance of the rusted Fruit Drop tin that the janitor finds on Seita's body and throws into the grass. Setsuko loved Fruit Drops and Seita put her ashes in it.
The scenes of a desperate Seita running into air raids so he can steal from the evacuated houses to get something to trade for food are really striking and tense.
I found it really wrenching that Seita finds out that Japan has surrendered the same day Setsuko dies. He only lasts another month or so.
The man who sells Seita charcoal for Setsuko's cremation says with a smile: "Undress the body and use dry husks. That's the key to a good fire. Look at that beautiful weather." It didn't even really come across as callous. Death has been such a standard fixture in Japan for so long that it's not really noteworthy, especially when the world seems so renewed. (i.e. the good weather and the war's end)
The rating in Netflix was TV-14 for "Fear, Smoking." .... Smoking. In this intense war film about privation, firebombs, grief, and dead children, definitely watch out for that smoking.
Conclusion
There's a lot more I could say about Grave of the Fireflies. It felt like every scene had something to note, to chew on, to wrestle with.
I think this is one of the best films I've ever seen.
I feel a little bit conflicted caveating my recommendation at the start. I absolutely believe self-care is important and subjecting yourself to an intense emotional experience when you're not in the headspace for it can be unwise. But at the same time, this was the story of real events that did happen, and are still happening in the world. Sometimes I feel like we shouldn't look away, because the people and the children who have to endure these actual events don't get to. They weren't in the headspace for any of it either. I don't know what the right answer is or what "right" even means in this context.
If you can you should watch Grave of the Fireflies, but I understand if you don't think you can bring yourself to.
-m
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