Rewatching ‘Grave of the Fireflies,’ the Ghibli anime you’ll only want to watch once
(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD)
Netflix talked about its impending exclusive streaming release of Grave of the Fireflies as if it were just any other movie by well-known Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli. But truly, the post should come with a warning.
The film is one of the most striking works of animation in history, and it’s one that many say will warrant only a single viewing in their lifetime. Ponyo on the Cliff, this movie is not.
I saw this once, in the 1990s, when I was a teen. It made me feel a lot of things, and some scenes stand out so starkly in my mind that I did not wish to relive the feelings this movie brought on me.
Now that I’m 41, I resolved to dig deeper by rewatching Grave of the Fireflies and learning more about why it hits so godsbedamned hard. I came into this task unprepared, but left appreciative of further context, and this is what I’ll be sharing with you here.
We begin with the end
My teen mind never noticed it but, in a second viewing, I realized it began with the very end of the movie laid out the beginning, as if to try and dampen the impact of next 80-or-so minutes.
The main characters, teenaged boy Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, have already died, and are celebrating getting on a train to the afterlife with fireflies marking their passing.
Everything after this point recounts their wartime tale, as they try, and inevitably fail, to survive against the elements and ultimately, a battle against starvation near the end of World War II or, were this any other anime, any other early-20th-century war.
The struggle rending hearts
It’s this struggle and inevitable failure for Seita and Setsuko to survive that ultimately rends hearts.
After being taken in – and eventually taken advantage of and discarded – by their aunt, Seita and Setsuko have to fend for themselves on diminishing amounts of money and a noticeable lack of supplies.
Seita is now the sole carer for Setsuko, and they move into an abandoned bomb shelter for housing, using fireflies they’ve caught as light in the dark evenings.
Seita does what he can, including fetching water, stealing food, and raiding houses during air raids to find a way to provide for them both. Ultimately, Setsuko gets sick from malnutrition and dies from it before she can eat one last meal prepared by her brother.
Seita, after cremating Setsuko and storing her ashes in the can they used to store sweets in, eventually dies of malnutrition, slumped against the pillar of a train station a few weeks later — which is where we find him and his tin can in the beginning of the movie.
An apology, by Nosaka Akiyuki
The movie is based off a short story called “A Grave of Fireflies” by Nosaka Akiyuki.
This particular story is semi-autobiographical, in that it was based on the author’s experiences surviving the Kobe air raids of 1945, when he was 15 years old. It was published in October 1967 and won awards and was eventually translated into English in 1968 by James R. Abrams.
I read a copy of Abrams’ translation, and if you haven’t noticed by now, there’s one marked difference between Nosaka Akiyuki’s semi-autobiographical tale and the movie.
Whereas Seita dies in the story and the movie, Nosaka survived.
As Abrams explains in his notes at the end of the story:
“Like Seita in the story, Nosaka was a junior high school student in Kobe when that city was hit by the B29 air raids. His home was destroyed by incendiary bombs and both his adopted parents were killed in the June 5 attack. He and his sister, then 16 months, moved to the home of a distant relative in the Manchitani area of Kobe, where she, like the older Setsuko in the story, died of malnutrition. Nosaka has related that he too washed the rash-covered body of his sister in the sea, and that he too released fireflies into his sister’s mosquito net to provide a flicker of light in that blackened out world.”
In the more than 20 years since the air raids, Nosaka had time to stew in the feelings he had, from guilt to remorse and all the despair surviving brings.
Which brought him to write an idealized tale of that time.
It brought him to see himself dying in a struggle to save his sister, who in the story had some ability to discern what was happening in the hellish situation they were in.
In the case of the stories, they were two innocents, made less innocent and and more loving, but no less tragic. Nosaka, the survivor, memorializes and crafts an apology for the actions he took to ensure his survival in his past.
This is the somber requiem that lies behind the selfsame sadness of The Grave of the Fireflies.
As such, we recommend you don’t plop onto your couch expecting to eat popcorn. Bring a handkerchief, an appreciation of the trauma of war and survival, and an earnestness to cry and absorb the tale being told for the 88 minutes you’re there.
Netflix’s streaming release of The Grave of the Fireflies happens on September 16. – Rappler.com