GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES
(d. Isao Takahata)
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The legend goes that no one had ever been moved to tears by an animated work until the night of December 21, 1937 and the world premiere of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The Disney animators themselves were reportedly shocked when - as Snow White lay in her bier - sniffles and then real sobs began to sound throughout the auditorium. "We couldn't believe it. This was just a cartoon," Disney animator Ward Kimball would later say, "Everybody was crying." Daily Variety, in reviewing the film the following morning, had to repeat itself, exclaiming, "tears - yes, tears" in trying to accurately convey the emotion of Snow White's premiere.
It was an impressive breakthrough - for the first time, animated characters had been given the space and the time to develop into fully realized personalities, and the future of animation looked extraordinarily bright. To this day, animation enthusiasts speculate where Walt would have taken animation if the marketplace for costly flops like Fantasia and Bambi had been different. While some ascribe the blame of decades of sugar-coated animated children's fare to Walt Disney, this notion is uninformed and incorrect. Walt wanted animated films to be given respect by his peers, and he and his artists struggled to make their films as dramatically powerful as any live action film could ever be.
Plaguing Walt was the notion that his medium was irrevocably distancing to people because of its inherent unreality. Animated characters aren't real, and your rational mind knows this. This built-in feature of animation as an unreal interpretation of life -- as opposed to a re-creation of life -- quickly developed into the medium's biggest strength, impacting children and adults on more levels than anyone had first suspected.
Consider that unreal image of the young fawn in [/i]Bambi[/i]. Your rational mind knows that image of a cartoon deer is not a real deer. It knows the image "stands for" a deer, and once your mind starts down that path, all sorts of associations can follow with it, making the image that much more vivid, particularly to young minds, I believe. The cartoon deer might wind up representing - on a very deep level - anything your subconscious attaches to it. The character of Snow White may rankle the older modern audience member because he or she associates the character with outmoded female roles, but a child only sees Snow White as a character first, then - deeper down - as a Mother figure, caring for little guys about their own height. They see the Queen, of course, as Death. It is no accident the Queen morphs into an extremely aged figure when she comes to kill her stepchild.
In this associative way, animated characters are moving ideas, arguing for or against the main theme of the material. And in this way, animation can - at times - touch us more deeply than any number of live-action dramas, accomplishing Walt's goal. Which brings us, of course, to Grave of the Fireflies.
Fifty years after that momentous premiere of Snow White, the small Japanese animated film Graveof the Fireflies debuted in Japan on a double-bill with Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro. Although championed by a few well-known film critics, most notably Roger Ebert, the film took years to find an American audience. Today, we're witnessing new attitudes towards animation in America. In the late 80's and early 90's, a tale of two Japanese children who suffer mightily from the indifference of those around them during the closing moments of World War II was a long way from The Little Mermaid and An American Tail. Like Fantasia and Bambi decades earlier, America simply wasn't ready for it.
Grave of the Fireflies is a Japanese Anime with the usual limited animation, running headlong against Character Animation dogma which argues for believability through caricature of movement. And yet, of any animated film I have ever seen that deals with human beings, despite the "unrealistic" limited animation, despite the anime stylizations, Grave of the Fireflies is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen. This is to animation what Schindler's List was to Spielberg - both a long overdue display of artistic maturity and a bold statement of ability.
The film was written and directed by Isao Takahata, and remains my first and only exposure to his work as an animation director, a career which stretches, I am told, some thirty years. His main strength as the storyteller of Grave of the Fireflies is his control and authority. I'm particularly impressed with his use of long extended shots of his characters as they move about (or ponder) their environs. American animated films avoid shots that last more than 5-7 seconds, because they're harder, they require extensive planning, and they task an animator's talent considerably. Since time is money in animation, such shots also cost more. American animated features are usually highly efficient narrative machines, with little time and money wasted on the kind of emotional reality or lyricism Takahata revels in.
Grave of the Fireflies is aggressive in its use of extended shots, and these allow Takahata's animators to breathe wonderfully-seen behaviors into their characters. There's a moment where the boy Seita traps an airbubble with a wash rag, submerges it, and then releases it into his sister Setsuko's delighted face - and that's when I knew I was watching something special. Details of behavior like that and an extended shot of a saddened Setsuko slowly swaying back and forth give the film a heightened naturalism, accomplishing Disney's goal of believability through a back door approach. Takahata's animation doesn't fool your eye, but his intelligence and observations fool your brain. Just as we come to believe that the cartoon deer is real because it moves in a realistic way, we come to believe these children are real - not because they move realistically (because they don't) - but because they behave realistically. That ONLY comes from an animator's observation and talent. These ARE real children, we come to believe, and we mourn for them - we become deeply involved in the plight of these two small moving ideas. This is a triumph of Anime expression.
Grave of the Fireflies is dependent on all of its details for its effect, especially the more gruesome ones, and the film pulls no punches -- the FX Animation in particular is so detailed you can almost feel the hot air sweeping the cinders down the burning Kobe streets. But Takahata doesn't employ shots of charred flesh for shock value - they're played "real", the characters and the camera lingering on such images in grief and horror before turning away in denial. By the end of the film, the camera cannot turn away any longer and the extended final moments with these characters are given their full measure of worth and heartbreak. It is a devastating experience.
Disney never intended for animation to become a medium for children in America -- in fact, he once grew angry during the production of Fantasia when a storyman referred to the film as a cartoon. Grave of the Fireflies is so important to me personally for a number of reasons - primarily because it unleashes the full undiluted power of the medium onto a mature modern story without the slightest pretext of pandering to seven year olds. Compare the control and emotional intelligence in Fireflies to Disney's visually-stunning Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hunchback is one of my favorite recent animated films, and yet I'll be the first one to tell you it is a film emasculated by concerns over the "squirm-factor" of toddlers. It has always been my belief that if you can't do a story like Hunchback without pandering to the kids and destroying the tone and reality of the film, maybe you shouldn't do Hunchback to begin with (the low comedy injected into deeply-felt moments like Alan Menken's "Heaven's Light" is unforgivable).
The only animated works I've seen that even approach both the heartbreak and the power of Grave of the Fireflies are Disney's own Education for Death, the 1942 propaganda short showing German children brainwashed into the Hitler Youth - and Martin Rosen's adaptation of Richard Adams' The Plague Dogs. Both films are propaganda works, one against the evils of Fascism, the other against scientific animal experimentation.
Fireflies is important, I think, because it is NOT a propaganda work. It is a serious drama that exists both within it's period context and outside of it. Like The Ox-Bow Incident, it achieves a universal truth beyond the specificity of its setting. As an American, before viewing Fireflies, I assumed there would be a propaganda bent on at least some level. I knew the film was about two Japanese children trying to survive the end of World War II, and such a story usually connotes at least one shot of an A-bomb. Spielberg's Empire of the Sun is also about a child trying to survive World War II. Even though Spielberg's film is set in mainland China, even he couldn't resist sneaking in a flash of light that his child protagonist imagines is the atomic blast at Hiroshima.
This never happens in Grave of the Fireflies. The film isn't concerned with such things, and in fact, patriotism and jingoism are concepts made moot by the material. The film is ultimately about our responsibility to one another as members of a human society, particularly a society being torn apart at the seams. The behaviours on display by the supporting characters, particularly Seita's Aunt, and the farmer who beats Seita severely, and the doctor who treats the scurvy-ravaged Setsuko - these are all models of self-involvement in the face of a deep humanitarian need. The film is a pointed criticism of societal neglect - and a psychological attack on the emotions of the viewer. Protection of the young is a deeply-embedded instinct in the human animal. Watching the children suffer from indifference to the point of death (and even possible suicide) takes viewers to prial emotional states few films ever reach. This is not about propaganda or WWII patriotism -- as a matter of fact, America gets off rather lightly in the film, with no mention at all of the Atomic blasts, nor any truly pointed criticism of the "total war" approach on the civilian populace. It is the inhumanity of humans in a crumbling society that is brought to the fore. It is not a propaganda work - it is a universal one. Fundamental decency doesn't belong to a race, or a government.
It is a shattering experience.
-- ER3, 12/7/1999
