Ink Tea Stone Leaf

To celebrate the release of The Boy and the Heron, last winter Ariele and I decided to watch all of the animated features in the Studio Ghibli canon. We revisited old favorites like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, and we got to experience a few for the first time, which had eluded us in previous years. I was particularly charmed by Whisper of the Heart, and by the works of Isao Takahata, of which I’d previously seen only one: his masterful final film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. “Ghibli Fest” was a great time in our house, and I can only recommend the experience; how could anybody do otherwise?

One thing bothered me about Ghibli Fest though, which was that we skipped a very important title: Takahata’s first film for the company, Grave of the Fireflies. There were two reasons for this, the first being that, due to licensing issues, it was not available on any of the streaming services we had access to at the time. The second was that Ariele refused to watch it with me. Grave of the Fireflies is well known by its reputation as a deeply moving story about a great sorrow, and the two of us are of different minds about the desirability of watching sad movies. In fairness, its reputation had also affected me in the past, at least so far as I’d never made an effort to seek it out.

So it wasn’t until this last week, with Ariele safely out of the house for a few hours, that I finally watched Grave of the Fireflies for the first time, courtesy of a DVD borrowed from the library. It hardly needs to be said that it is a beautiful movie, or that it is a difficult one to watch without being affected; Fireflies tells the story of two children, a young teenage boy and his four-year-old sister, who succumb to illness and starvation in the final stages of World War II, having lost their mother to a bombing and their father to a battle at sea. Whatever else it is, it is a movie you need to steel yourself for.

A curious fact of history is that Fireflies was produced at Studio Ghibli simultaneously with another film, My Neighbor Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, who had once been a protege of Takahata’s; the two of them were co-founders of Ghibli. Miyazaki had already directed one film for the company, and would go on to write and direct many more of Ghibli’s features, his own reputation as a prolific genius of animation becoming nearly synonymous with the high regard of the studio’s collected works. Both movies were released on the same day in 1988, as something of a double feature, and both are now regarded as among the greatest of all time. Fans who are aware of their joint history cannot, however, avoid a sense of tonal whiplash. What must it have been like to view one after the other, when Fireflies is so dour, and Totoro is so lighthearted, beloved as it is by young children and their families?

It’s clear that audiences preferred Totoro, and responded to the movie and the beloved title character as something essential in the spirit of Ghibli, setting it apart from other, similar studios. You certainly don’t need to steel yourself for Totoro; it embraces you from the beginning with warmth and friendliness, and after some thrills and a few mild scares it leaves you with comfort and reassurance. It’s more commercial, in the kindest sense of that word; the appeal is obvious and intensely attractive to its intended audience. Fireflies, on the other hand, was never going to sell many plush toys.

Having now seen both, I can better appreciate how challenging it must have been to take in both stories in one day. What I think I can also understand is why that double release was decided upon in the first place, and I don’t think it was just so the commercial film could lend a helpful aura to the less commercial one. In many ways, Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro are about the same things, and can be thought of as a unified artistic statement by two storytellers with similar values and comparable skills and talents.

In the broad strokes, these are both stories about children growing up, and the difficulty of facing life without the aid of their parents. An older sibling is squeezed between the obligation to look after a younger one, and the limitation of their own immaturity and inexperience. The children are placed in unfamiliar rural settings, far from the stabilizing infrastructure of city life, and are made to rely on the aid of an unfamiliar community to make their way in the world. It’s on that last point that the most important difference between the two stories turns, making the greatest difference between the hopeful fantasy of Totoro and the grim reality of Fireflies: Satsuki and Mei can depend on being helped when they really need it; Seika and Setsuko cannot.

It’s easy to recall iconic, magical moments from Totoro, such as the exhilarating flight on the Cat Bus, or the miraculous, instantaneous growth of seeds into enormous trees. Central to the story, however, is the anxiety and distress the sisters feel over the poor health of their mother, who resides in a distant hospital, while the father spends long hours away at work in the city. Their mothers’ recovery is far from assured, and takes several wrong turns. When Mei disappears while trying to walk all the way to the hospital by herself, she is feared dead by her sister and the rest of the village, and it’s very important to recognize that she easily could have died. Equally important to recognize is that, while the magical Totoro is the one who ultimately leads Satsuki and Mei home safely, the whole community comes together in the search, their concern for the safety of the two children overriding all others in that moment. Totoro is only one of the girls’ good neighbors, and in this neighborly atmosphere everything turns out for the best, or at least for the anticipation of a more hopeful outcome.

By contrast, the story of Seika and Setsuko is one of escalating abandonment and isolation, as a community stressed by the deprivations of war grows increasingly indifferent and hostile to a pair of vulnerable orphans. It begins with Seika starving to death, as he is stepped around and over by a contemptuous public; he and the ghost of Setsuko then view the events of their own lives in retrospective, beginning with the bombing raid that killed their mother, and ending with Setsuko’s lonely cremation. After leaving the home of relatives who have grown to resent their presence, they are reduced to squatting in an abandoned shelter on the edge of town, spending what little money they have while Seika steals what they can’t afford. Seika does everything in his power to build a decent home for himself and his sister on the margins of society, but the tragedy is that what power he has is completely insufficient. He can’t save his sister or himself without access to the town’s resources, and he can’t secure that access, or effectively use what he has.

What is especially heartbreaking is that many of Seika’s decisions are decidedly sub-optimal with regard to their long term survival. As a fourteen-year-old boy who has endured a terrible loss, he is much too quick to separate from the relatives who, if nothing else, feel honor-bound to keep him and Setsuko fed and clothed while they stay in their house. His decision to take Setsuko with him, rather than strike out on his own, compounds the error and exposes her to unconscionable danger. It bears repeating, however, that he is a child, and even children who haven’t been traumatized by the horrors of war make foolish decisions. He’s too young to have a four-year-old depend entirely on him, and he has too little wisdom to foresee the consequences of his choices, and the most terrible thing is that the people who should have been responsible for him are too strapped and preoccupied to stop him.

An adult with more experience and skill in foraging might have done better, but it would still have been the wrong decision, because it was made for immature reasons; coping with the loss of their old lives by satisfying short term desires, making himself and Setsuko happy in the moment with fantasies of freedom at the expense of their welfare in the long term. Seika’s only real plan for the next stage in their lives is waiting for their father to return, victorious, from the war and take care of them. When he finally realizes that this won’t happen, he has nothing else except to vainly prolong the inevitable. By then, his relationship to the struggling community that might have nurtured him and his sister back to health is little more than that of an opportunistic scavenger. The people have little interest in helping a boy who steals from them as they continue to endure the misery of air raids and strict rationing.

A powerful message underlies this story: human life is better, or perhaps life is only possible, when people are supported by thriving communities that see to one another’s needs. The greatest horror of war is that it disrupts, diminishes, and ultimately destroys the ability of people to care for one another. The corollary of this is that isolation leads to decline and death. Seika and Setsuko have many happy moments together throughout the movie, and there is a beautiful spark of humanity in their love for each other, but the truth is that the moment they begin to withdraw from society is the moment that they both begin to waste away.

Grave of the Fireflies is by far the most emotionally heavy film in the Ghibli canon, but my main feeling as the credits rolled was of how much of a piece it was, not only with My Neighbor Totoro, but with all the other films of Takahata and Miyazaki. This is a Ghibli film through and through, not only because of the technical excellence of its composition, animation, and scoring, but because of its passionate humanism and honest, emotionally complex storytelling. It is a shame that, for arbitrarily corporate reasons, it has been made somewhat less accessible to audiences in this era, because it deserves to be seen and to be reckoned with as much as any other.

Fortunately, after watching my DVD and returning it to the library, I became aware that, earlier this week, Grave of the Fireflies was made available to stream on Netflix, which is about as accessible as you can get. Naturally, I encourage anybody who hasn’t seen it to give it a chance, as it is not only one of the best, but one of the most valuable animated films we have. Whether your younger kids watch it with you is a matter of discretion, as there are graphic depictions of severe burns and malnutrition; these depictions are not presented for shock value. The overall tone is tragic, but poignant.