January
20, 2003
When
the American movie-going public is constantly being fed junk food,
it ruins their sensibilities. They don't trust their better instincts.
Whenever I tell anyone who will listen that Isao Takahata's Grave
of the Fireflies is just about the greatest animated picture
ever made, I'm greeted with strange looks. Nobody really believes
that. American animation mostly relies upon formulaic pastry ala
Disney, Dreamworks, and television. But Fireflies is far
different; a transcendent masterpiece in its own right.
It's
hard to get someone fired up about a picture that's so hard for
Westerners to define. At the core, Grave of the Fireflies
is a movie about two children who are bombed out of their home during
World War II. Not exactly the way to reach someone who just dumped
Shrek in front of their kids.
Fireflies
is certainly one of the more serious Studio Ghibli titles, and one
can't imagine any other studio that would produce this movie and
My Neighbor Totoro at the same
time. The two are nearly polar opposites (and shared a double bill
for its Japenese premier), but its that creative diversity that
has made Ghibli the best movie studio in the world.
The
story is based on a bestselling novel by Akiyuki Nosaka. A survivor
of the firebombing of Kobe in World War II, Nosaka battled starvation
and actually lost his younger sister to malnutrition. Haunted for
years by the experience, driven by the guilt of his sister's death,
he wrote the book in hopes of silencing the ghosts surrounding him.
Like
the book, the movie focuses almost exclusively on two children who
become casualties in the Kobe bombing. All throughout, there is
an encroaching sense of isolation. Seita and Setsuko lose their
home, then lose their mother. They travel to the home of a distant
aunt, who turns out to be distant in more ways than one. Increasingly
frustrated, the aunt coldly discards the children; they lose their
surrogate home and turn to a hillside bomb shelter. The surrounding
adults, the farmers and the doctors and the officers, are either
unable or unwilling to notice the orphaned two. The world itself
seems to be collapsing around them.
Grave
of the Fireflies is such an emotional experience that it's
difficult, nearly impossible for many, to make it through in one
sitting. Take one pivotal scene, for instance. The children's aunt
is persuading Seita to give up his mother's garments so they can
be sold. Setsuko awakens to see her aunt taking the clothes, and
starts screaming; she comes completely undone. Seita is struggling
to hold her back and he's coming undone. The kicker is that the
girl doesn't yet know her mother died. All the while, Seita's ghost
is watching (as he silently narrates), and he's coming undone; he
can't bear to hear his sister's cries.
The
first time I watched Fireflies, I was so overcome at this
point in the story that I had to turn the videotape off. I couldn't
return until the next evening, because it's so hard to watch. Even
now, several years and several vewings later, its suffering and
peacefullness remain a deeply touching experience.
When
speaking about this film, Takahata and Nosaka confess that this
story is better suited for animation, and they may be right. Perhaps
this simply couldn't work with live actors. We would be too self-conscious
of the sight of a real 4-year-old suffering; it would either look
overly maudlin or hokey. But when animated, we more readily accept
what Takahata shows us. It's realistic, but in the sense that Van
Gogh and Coltrane is real. With its warm humanity, you feel emotions
pulled out of you that you never knew you had.
Fireflies
is equally full of moments of serene beauty, scenes of peaceful
vitality. Visually, this is a beautiful movie. Everything is drawn
in lush, vivid watercolors; the greens and blues of the lake, the
saturated reds of a devastated Kobe, even the smoke from the bombers
looks poetic. A bucket, a mop, a well - the film is littered with
these snapshots of daily details. These transitory pillow shots
are straight out of Yasujiro Ozu's movies (with a couple nods to
Ray's Apu Trilogy), and it's these naturalist moments that
stay with me the most.
This
style of filmmaking is almost unheard of in animation. In the film's
signature moment, the two children fill their cave with fireflies
from the lake. The look on their faces is almost rapturous joy.
The fireflies are gathered, they fly around the cave. It's an almost
spiritual moment; the fireflies dance and glow, then slowly dim
and fade by dawn. In the morning, the little girl buries them, and
imagines her own mother's death.
You
can't imagine any director pulling that off in America without mangling
it a dozen different ways. But after watching, how can you imagine
anyone not making films like this? How can one settle for the same
routine again? By the time the final credits roll, you become convinced
that Takahata is a genius and revolutionary; his two other masterpieces,
Omohide Poro Poro and Anne
of Green Gables, cement that belief.
It
may take another decade or two for the masses in America to realize
this, and that may not happen until some brave filmmakers finally
try to create neo-realist animation here. The prohibitive costs
of creating animated films and the corporate mindset of Hollywood
guarantee that this won't happen anytime soon. That needs to change,
because we deserve scores of movies influenced by Takahata and Grave
of the Fireflies. |
