Review: Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies on Sentai Blu-ray

Sentai Filmworks has done an admirable job on their A/V transfer of Takahata's deeply humanist anime.

Grave of the FirefliesIt comes as little surprise that writer-director Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies is as vital and potent today as it was after its premiere in Japan in 1988. This wrenching yet largely unsentimental anime depicts the “collateral damage” of the United States’s firebombing of Japan in the waning years of World War II, but its ultimate aim is a universal understanding of the toll of warfare. Ironically, it’s likely because of its sincere humanism and blunt attitude toward the ugliness of war, especially those fought from a distance, that the film isn’t more widely celebrated.

Co-founder of Studio Ghibli with Hayao Miyazaki, whom he worked with on the sublime Kiki’s Delivery Service, among other films, Takahata is chiefly a neorealist, a conjurer of unfettered human experience working in a medium (and studio) known for its allegiance to fantasy and otherworldliness. Indeed, the story of Grave of the Fireflies could have easily enticed Kon Ichikawa with its sensitive, moral, and honest detailing of life during wartime, seen through the narrative lens of a brother and sister (voiced by Tsutomu Tatsumi and Ayano Shiraishi, respectively) who are orphaned by firebombing and find unstable shelter with their aunt at a nearby village.

Takahata makes survival the thematic core of the story, but he never degrades his characters or fetishizes their suffering. Nor, for that matter, does the director handle them with kid gloves. Setsuko, pre-adolescent sister to teenaged Seita, proves to be as needy and cloying as a deprived middle-class child would presumably be in a time of national disaster, and Takahata’s script smartly works in a way for Seita to tend to this neediness. Satiating Setsuko’s emotional outbursts and sudden mood swings is part of the survival, and Seita uses the remnants of a can of fruit drops as a reminder of faith, a superfluous nicety substituting for the comfort they were once surrounded by thanks to their naval-officer father and loving mother.

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Set largely in a small rural village, Grave of the Fireflies offers a deft abstraction of memory. The film’s source material is Akiyuki Noraka’s novel of the same name, which is centered on the author’s remembrances of his sister’s death due to malnutrition after the Kobe firebombing in 1945. The animation itself works as a sort of filter, an agent of augmentation between Noraka’s personal experiences and the harrowing story Takahata unveils; the fact that it’s animated also implies, rightly but perhaps unfairly, that it’s a story meant for children. And if Takahata’s framing device of Seita and Setsuko roaming the afterlife together is some kind of bet-hedging, the script renders the scenes more warm and solemn than sentimental and religious.

As food and resources diminish, so does the small community become less giving and forgiving to the siblings, who eventually find a home in a small cave by the local pond. Takahata pays careful attention to the decay of capitalism here, as the lack of fresh food almost entirely eliminates the use of the siblings’ money or any trade they might have made. A strident corrective to any war film where glory is won without any sense of overwhelming, genuine loss, Grave of the Fireflies depicts the physical and mental disintegration of Setsuko with convincing realism and a firm grasp on the importance of routine. The daily tasks the siblings set up for themselves give the characters a sense of purpose and discovery, and the film benefits greatly from the balance struck between this understanding of normal, quotidian existence and how the gruesome aftermath of war disrupts that normality.

The film’s title comes from a scene late in the film that speaks directly to the human indifference that Takahata is obviously raging against. After the siblings’ first night in the cave, they find that the fireflies they caught have died and Setsuko buries them in a tiny hole. At that moment, Takahata cuts back to the mass grave that Setsuko and Seita’s mother was tossed in after the firebombing. The long tragedy of war, its endless horror and degradation, isn’t reserved solely for those who march bravely across enemy lines.

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Takahata’s saturnine study of innocence rotted away in the name of righteousness belongs next to such recent triumphs as Clint Eastwood’s diptych of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima as a sobering reminder that America’s wars are never clean or truly righteous. That Grave of the Fireflies has never received a proper release in an American theater speaks to exactly how willing we are to swallowing that cumbersome pill.

Image/Sound

Sentai Filmworks has done some strong work with Isao Takahata’s film and the entire package is similar to their Blu-ray release of Ninja Scroll. Colors look excellent, from the greens, blues, and browns of the cave near the pond to the blood orange tint that hangs over the afterlife sequences. Black levels are strong and the general line detail is quite crisp overall. Visually, it’s a big step up from the DVD release. The DTS Master Audio 2.0 in Japanese and English is more than serviceable, if not as crisp as you might wish. Still, fidelity and clarity are optimal, with dialogue out front and Michio Mamiya’s lovely score mixing with the sound effects nicely. Not the royal treatment the film deserves, but a solid transfer nevertheless.

Extras

Apart from a theatrical trailer for the film, the only extras provided are storyboard drawings of the entire film and deleted scenes. The storyboards are fun and interesting enough for a few minutes, but quickly grow tiresome.

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Overall

Sentai Filmworks has done an admirable job on their A/V transfer of Isao Takahata’s deeply humanist anime, but the few extras afforded do nothing to help contextualize this hugely effective anti-war fable.

Score: 
 Cast: Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi, Yoshiko Shinohara, Akemi Yamaguchi  Director: Isao Takahata  Screenwriter: Isao Takahata  Distributor: Sentai Filmworks  Running Time: 89 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1988  Release Date: November 20, 2012  Buy: Video

Chris Cabin

Chris Cabin co-hosts the popular We Hate Movies podcast.

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