How personal trauma and national tragedy inspired… | Little White Lies

How per­son­al trau­ma and nation­al tragedy inspired Grave of the Fireflies

06 May 2021

Anime-style illustration featuring an adult male figure with a facial covering and a young child, set against a background of traditional Japanese buildings and greenery.
Anime-style illustration featuring an adult male figure with a facial covering and a young child, set against a background of traditional Japanese buildings and greenery.
Read an exclu­sive extract from the new BFI Clas­sics book on Isao Takahata’s sem­i­nal 1988 animé.

In March 1945, as the Pacif­ic War entered its endgame, the Unit­ed States launched a con­cert­ed cam­paign to destroy Japan’s cities with fire. The stat­ed aim was to crip­ple the country’s indus­tri­al base; in prac­tice, civil­ians were indis­crim­i­nate­ly attacked. Urban Japan, dense with wood and paper, proved high­ly vul­ner­a­ble to incen­di­ary bombs. By the war’s end on 15 August, almost all cities of appre­cia­ble size lay in ruins.

On 5 June, incen­di­aries fell on the east­ern part of Kobe, the country’s main over­seas port. In the ensu­ing chaos, four­teen-year-old Akiyu­ki Nosa­ka fled his burn­ing home alone. Lat­er that day, at a makeshift hos­pi­tal, he found his six­teen-month-old adop­tive sis­ter and moth­er, who was severe­ly burned; his father was nev­er seen again. While their moth­er recov­ered, Nosa­ka and his sis­ter drift­ed between refuges: first a relative’s home near Kobe, then a bomb shel­ter, and final­ly an acquaintance’s house in a dif­fer­ent province. Mal­nu­tri­tion stalked them through­out, even­tu­al­ly tak­ing the lit­tle girl’s life on 21 August.

Nosa­ka sur­vived to become one of post­war Japan’s most orig­i­nal writ­ers, but the trau­mas of these months lived on with him, resur­fac­ing time and again in his work. He revis­it­ed this peri­od in his best-known sto­ry, the novel­la Grave of the Fire­flies (1967).

Once the US Air Force had dis­abled Japan’s major metrop­o­lis­es, it set its sights on small­er cities. On 29 June, the cam­paign reached Okaya­ma, 70 miles west of Kobe. Awok­en by the bombs, nine-year-old Isao Taka­ha­ta found his home emp­ty but for his old­er sis­ter. Their father had dashed to the school where he was head­mas­ter – pro­to­col required him to pro­tect the cer­e­mo­ni­al pho­to­graph of the emper­or. The rest of the fam­i­ly was in the back­yard shelter.

Unaware of this, the pair pan­icked and fled into the blaz­ing city. When his sis­ter was injured by a blast, Taka­ha­ta tend­ed to her; she’d lat­er say he had saved her life. They were reunit­ed with their fam­i­ly after two days. Although rel­a­tive­ly for­tu­nate, Taka­ha­ta would rank this expe­ri­ence as the worst of his life. Four decades lat­er, by then a promi­nent direc­tor in Japan’s ani­ma­tion indus­try, he decid­ed to turn Nosaka’s novel­la into a fea­ture. He recalled those two days so vivid­ly that details from them end­ed up in his film.

Takahata’s Grave of the Fire­flies (1988), then, is an unusu­al­ly per­son­al adap­ta­tion of a remark­ably inti­mate text. The mem­o­ries and philoso­phies of its two authors are entwined, some­times inex­tri­ca­bly, in its sim­ple sto­ry. Nosa­ka was under­stand­ably pro­tec­tive of his novel­la, which he long sus­pect­ed might be unfilmable. It took Taka­ha­ta, a man who shared some of his for­ma­tive expe­ri­ences, to con­vince him oth­er­wise. Here was a direc­tor with an excep­tion­al­ly pre­cise artis­tic vision, work­ing in an envi­ron­ment – Stu­dio Ghi­b­li – geared toward real­iz­ing that vision, with a medi­um – ani­ma­tion – that resolved the prob­lems of adaptation.

The sto­ry has the shape of a melo­dra­ma, and indeed the film is dis­cussed above all in terms of its sad­ness. Most view­ers expe­ri­ence it as a straight­for­ward tragedy – a pow­er­ful evo­ca­tion of war’s worst effects. Its Amer­i­can dis­trib­u­tor described it as a three-hand­ker­chief movie on a scale of one to three’, and audi­ence reac­tions bear this claim out: view­ers young and old are often reduced to tears.

Reviews, Japan­ese and oth­er­wise, tend to focus on the film’s capac­i­ty to move us. Rel­a­tive­ly few ask what else it may be try­ing to do. Rarely is it sub­stan­tial­ly crit­i­cized, except when polit­i­cal sen­si­tiv­i­ties come into play. Com­men­tary on the film can strike an almost rev­er­en­tial tone, as if its solemn sub­ject and roots in auto­bi­og­ra­phy place it beyond reproach. This con­sen­sus is a kind of vin­di­ca­tion for Taka­ha­ta, who was warned, when he set out to cre­ate a som­bre his­tor­i­cal dra­ma with a real­ism almost unprece­dent­ed in ani­ma­tion, that nobody would want to watch such a film. Yet it also belies the nuances of his inten­tions and indi­cates that, in an impor­tant sense, Fire­flies was a failure.

BFI Film Clas­sics: Grave of the Fire­flies is pub­lished by Blooms­bury on 6 May.

You might like