Japan is also depicted as aggressive empire conquering other countries in Asia. It is based on the semi-biographical short story under the same title written by Akiyuki Nosaka. The film is animated by the production company Studio Ghibli. Although My Neighbor Totoro was a financial success, Grave of the Fireflies was having difficulty gathering movie viewers.
Despite its financial difficulties at the time of its showing, it is still considered by many critics as one of the most powerful anti-war films created. The film starts with a night sometime after the end of WWII, a boy is shown to be slumped in a pillar and dying of starvation. Officers took care of the body and found a candy tin in which the officer threw it out in a nearby field. We are shown the spirit of the same boy picking up the same candy tin and is joined by a spirit of another younger child in a field of fireflies.
The film then proceeds with a flashback of the final few months of the war. In a village in Kobe, a fleet of American plane bombers dropped an air strike in the area. Seita and his little sister Setsuno were separated from their mother and were unable to to reach the bomb shelter. After the air raid, the mother is shown to have died and the siblings went to live with their aunt.
With scarce food and water and Seita not being able to find a job, the aunt grew irritated of taking care of the siblings. The aunt tells them that food should be given to people who are actually serving the country. If they wanted food they should earn it. During wartime conditions, even family and relatives find it hard to be generous. The siblings eventually left the house and they occupied an abandoned bomb shelter near the river.
They were forced to live on their own with limited food and money. Seita resulted to stealing food and looting materials during air raids. Setsuko then is shown to be dying of malnutrition and Seita is forced to make withdrawal of the very little amount of money they have left. It is there that Seita learned that Japan surrendered unconditionally and their father, who is a captain of Imperial Japanese Navy, died. Eventually Setsuko died before Seita was able to finish cooking food for her.
Seita then discovers that his mother had provided them with a comfortable sum, allowing them to feed themselves without depending on their aunt. During a nighttime air raid alert, Seita spots an abandoned refuge that could become their new home, far from their aunt's nagging. This prompts Seita and Setsuko to move out and live in that old, abandoned bomb shelter. Setsuko is delighted, imagining the shelter as that of a real home. The two children thus continue their existence without worrying about the future.
Seita relocates to an abandoned shelter, thinking their leftover money would be enough to survive through the war. In the evening, the two children collect a good quantity of fireflies which they release in the cabin. The light of the fireflies reminds Seita of fireworks, during the naval review after which her father went to war. And the lights to become DCA tracer bullets, destroying enemy bombers.
The next day, Seita finds her sister digging a hole in the ground. Puzzled, he asks her the reason for this behavior. Innocently, Setsuko replies that she is digging a grave for the fireflies, her aunt having explained to her that this had been done for her mother. Overwhelmed by this gesture, remembering the unbearable images of her mother's body thrown into a pit, Seita can no longer contain herself and cries bitterly. He promises Setsuko that they will one day visit their mother's grave.
Gradually, they begin to run out of rice, and Setsuko begins to starve. Seita turns to stealing from local farmers and looting homes during air raids for supplies. When finally caught, he realizes his desperation and takes an increasingly-ill Setsuko to a doctor, who informs him that Setsuko is suffering from malnutrition.
When he learns of his father's death, Seita removes all the money from their mother's bank account and purchases a large quantity of food. Rushing back to the shelter, he finds a dying Setsuko hallucinating. She is sucking marbles which she believes are fruit drops. She offers him 'rice balls' which are really only made out of mud. Seita hurries to cook, but it's too late: Setsuko dies of starvation.
After watching over her sister's lifeless body, Seita decides to cremate her little sister himself.
He uses supplies donated to him by a farmer and places Setsuko in a large wicker basket and sets it on fire, while the fireflies fly around to the sky. He then leaves her ashes in the fruit tin, which he carries with his father's photograph, until his death from malnutrition in Sannomiya Station a few weeks later. It is now present day. Setsuko runs up towards Seita. Both ended up in death. With her head on her brother's lap, she falls asleep peacefully, as a few fireflies fly through the air.
Seita looks at the viewer, then turns her head towards the lights of the skyscrapers of a modern city Nosaka Akiyuki was seen as a very colorful personality in Japan. His guilt over his sister's death drove him to write Grave of the Fireflies. Nosaka Akiyuki was born in Kamakura, a seaside Japanese city just south of Tokyo in , but his mother died soon after giving birth and Nosaka was adopted by an aunt in Manchidani-cho, Kobe far to the west , whom he believed to be his mother.
Nosaka's father did not maintain contact, and remarried. When the war came to Japan, Nosaka, too old to be evacuated and too young to be conscripted, became part of the cohort charged with air-raid defense. When Kobe was fire-bombed in June 5, , his adopted father was killed and his "mother" badly injured. Nosaka ran away with Keiko, his infant "sister", but — unlike in the anime — he, and the adults around him, failed to care adequately for her, and she died in August He subsequently moved to Tokyo, where he was caught stealing and was left in a juvenile detention center, where he witnessed many of his fellow inmates die of starvation.
Finally, his natural father — by now a local councilor — was contacted, and reclaimed him. The story is based on the semi-autobiographic novel by the same name, whose author, the late Akiyuki Nosaka , lost his sister Keiko due to malnutrition in wartime Japan.
He blamed himself for her death and wrote the story so as to make amends to her and help him accept the tragedy. Nosaka has described his path as circling incessantly around a vortex — and literary critic Setsuji Shimizu has likened this circling to that of a vulture circling his own memory.
In middle of the night, against the night wind, I would wash the lice from my sister's skin with bottled water taken from the sea I wish I had at least petted my sister as much as Seita did in the novel I wasn't that kind.
Seita's death in the opening is seen by the author as a suicide, and his journey in the film his personal "Hell" until he reaches "Heaven".
In an interview, Akiyuki Nosaka recounted that right after he collected his sister's bones and started wandering aimlessly, electricity was restored to the city. The lights suddenly swept through the darkness. After struggling in Hell, he suddenly finds himself in Heaven. At the end of the film, Seita and Nosaka have reached the end of a long and painful experience. In another interview on Animage in , Director Isao Takahata likened the book to a "double-suicide" play,.
I thought it was that in its structure, as well. It starts with the premise that the main characters must die, and the story follows the path to their death. And the image of death is lined up just behind it. In that sense, it's an erotic film and it gave me a cold sweat. Grave of the Fireflies author Nosaka Akiyuki on how he feels about Takahata adapting his experience some years prior in animated form.
Having lived the horror of the end of the Second World War in Japan, when he was only 14 years old, Nosaka is deeply marked by the American bombings. His adoptive mother dies under the bombs, her sister dies of hunger, and Nosaka is convinced of her guilt in these two dramas. He finds himself locked in a reformatory after food thefts. Saved by his biological father at a juvenile detention center, Nosaka nevertheless retained an oppressive feeling of guilt in him.
When he wrote the short story The Grave of the Fireflies twenty years later, the autobiographical link seems obvious. However, Nosaka chose to sacrifice Seita. We can see in this act of writing the way to regain dignity, to exorcise the demon that haunts him: Seita does not survive his family and therefore does not have to suffer the feeling of having betrayed his fate by surviving to his.
Director Isao Takahata tasked Studio Ghibli colorist Michiyo Yasuda to work with dark color tones, something she admitted hadn't been done often in their previous projects. Isao Takahata respected this interpretation very scrupulously.
Indeed, only the passages where Seita and his sister contemplate their past life as spirits has been freely adapted by Takahata. The glowing hue of the introduction, contrasting with the dominant cold tones in the rest of the film, will punctuate the story thereafter. The occasional shift of these dreamlike sequences in relation to the general realistic subject allows, in a very sober, uncluttered way, a certain dramatization of the story.
According to French fansite Buta Connection, in the short story, the identity of the narrator is unclear, but one can assume that it is the voice of the author. This narrator tells the story from a third person perspective, creating some distance. In the film, Seita's mind is free to move, and as the narrator, speaks from a first person perspective.
He becomes a witness, whose fate we know from the start "September 21, , I died". Before recommending the best travel gear , I used to play disco, house, and techno electronic music in gigs and parties in Barcelona during a few years.
Fortunately, at some point in my life, I had to balance my priorities, and I changed the vinyl records with the backpack. But Takahata justifies it with an ingenious stylistic gambit in which the modern sequences and characters are rendered in an atypically realistic manner, while her childhood is presented in a look that more closely adheres to the conventions of anime.
Although quite funny in spots, this is not merely an empty-headed kiddie film by any stretch of the imagination—it gets fairly serious at times. She grows in stature and beauty and virtually everyone who encounters her falls in love with her. The sons of five important families all propose marriage to her but when she orders them to finds proper gifts for her, they fail. However, when the Emperor of Japan himself turns up with a proposal of his own, it leads to a set of circumstances that force Kaguya to finally come to terms with herself and her parents about who she really is.
This film would also go on to receive accolades and an Oscar nomination as well. There were rumors he may have been working on something new, but he had reportedly been in poor health recently and developed a heart condition last year. Of course, when the subject of great Japanese animated filmmakers comes up, Miyazaki is the name that most people are going to gradually gravitate towards, in the same way that people in America will instantly conjure up Disney.
However, Isao Takahata was no mere Saleri who was cursed to constantly stand in the shadow of greatness.
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