AKIYUKI NOSAKA is dead at 85. With his passing, we feel that we have rested in peace also his grief and the sadness we shared with him in his animated film Grave of the Fireflies.
The ephemeral, a grand aesthetic in Japanese arts and culture, has never received a greater tribute than in the wartime story recalled by Nosaka. He wrote a short story about two siblings, Seita and Setsuko, during the last months of the Second World War. The setting was Kobe. Nosaka had said in interviews how he was approached by many film directors, but he thought his story was difficult to capture on screen. Nosaka said no child actor would be able to portray well either of his two characters. When he was offered the idea that his story be done in animation, he was surprised. But when, finally, he saw the advances in the technologies of animation, he thought nothing but animation could give life to his story.
In 1988 Grave of the Fireflies was released by Ghibli Studio as created by Isao Takahata. In Tokyo it was billed as a double-feature film with another classic from Ghibli Studio, called My Neighbor Totoro. The latter was about two children again, coping with the absence of their mother, who was at the hospital for an undisclosed affliction. Totoro was a bright paean to old Japan with green rice paddies and sweet, big homes; Grave of the Fireflies was filled with sorrow and darkness. The results were not quite good at the box-office.
Released as a separate film, Grave of the Fireflies went on to universal acclaim.
Flashback to 1991. I was a research fellow in Tokyo, and in the Soshigaya Ryugakusei Kaikan, or Foreign Students’ Dormitory, I befriended a graduate art student from Canada: Baldwin. He was into animation and was curious, having known that I was interested in Japanese cinema, if I had favorite Japanese animated film. That year, animation had not yet achieved the massive popularity it now enjoys not only in the Philippines but all over the world.
“Would you like to watch an animated film that could make you cry?” This was Baldwin’s challenge, plus beer and some cheese. I was honest with him: I don’t think there ever was such a film that would move me to tears. There I was, in Baldwin’s room, with beer and peanuts to make my viewing more relaxing. By the time Setsuko was complaining about itchiness on her back to the doctor, there was already lump on my throat. In the end, Setsuko got sick and Seita cremated her. The person who sold Seita the materials for cremation commented on how the day was ideal for burning. Against the backdrop of Seita watching over the makeshift cremation, a family was shown returning after the war to their big home. There was laughter and the gramophone began playing “Home, Sweet, Home.” Baldwin then asked me if he could turn on the light in his room. I remember now telling him not to—I was not crying, I was sobbing.
If the story of the two children was just about the horror of war, Grave of the Fireflies (a literal translation of the Japanese title, Hotaru no Haka) would not have been the great work it is today.
The animation is unique in that it uses a visual style that is known for light-hearted tales and fantasies. The story, as narrated by Seita, begins with him stating the date of his death. Then the focus goes to his corpse. A long flashback occurs showing the two children when they were happier at the onset of war. Their father is an officer in the Imperial Army and has left them with enough provision. Their mother is with them until the day when the city of Kobe is bombed. The mother dies and Seita does not tell his little sister about the tragedy. Thus, begins their hardship during the war.
There are many outstanding elements in the animation. There is the narrative which seems to be aided by a vision that is cinematic. When one examines the scenes and how they unfold, there are panoramic, medium and close-up shots. It is amazing, I told myself the first time I saw it, how drawings could have an emotional impact on viewers.
Seita is a ghost narrator, unusual in Western story-telling but part of the theatrical tradition of Japan. In Noh, for example, the main characters are ghosts coming back from the dead or from the past to recall their recrimination and the reason for their sadness.
The late film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times lists Grave of the Fireflies among his top movies of all time. He calls it “an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation.” Many critics appraised Grave of the Fireflies as an antiwar film. Isao Takahata, the animator, disagrees.
Way back in the late 1990s, we brought Grave of the Fireflies to some selected provincial screenings under the auspices of the Japan Foundation Manila. In Davao, where Japanese communities were aplenty in the years leading to World War II, some men went short of indicting us for being pro-Japanese apologists.
What in the end comes as the message of truth brought by Grave of the Fireflies is that children first, followed by women, are the most vulnerable to war, and that after war, things can never be the same again. You lose wealth, honor, families, friends and innocence to war. At the end of the film, Seita is reunited with his dear little sister. The depleted can of candies comes alive once more with the sweets inside abundant for the little girl. The two children sit on a bench and look, from that promontory, at the beautiful rebuilt port city of Kobe. From where he is now, Akiyuki Nosaka must be looking down from some promontory on the entirety of Japan, for whom the cruel war it inflicted on itself is a distant, fading memory. What must the writer be thinking?