Though I know our local library had this when I was in high school, this evening was the first time I watched it. I didn’t cry (though I tend to), but I had a sinking feeling at many points in the film.
Setsuko is so charming, and it’s portrayed well from her little voice to her little movements. If anything was going to make me cry, it would have been all the time she cried. The sight of that rash was hard to see too.
Even if Seita was “selfish,” it’s kind of moot as it looks like his aunt’s house is destroyed in one of the later bombings. I have a relative who (to me) inexplicably broke communication with certain family members. To my mind, it is entirely irrational and I’ve tried to press the point a couple times, but the only outcome was eventually becoming convinced that something in her psyche just made it impossible to be around them. I could see this sort of thing happening to Seita. Sure, add up the pros and cons, but at some point it was just too much for him to keep living there when there was any other way.
As awful as she is, I still have some sympathy with the aunt too. It’s hard to take in orphans, and it makes sense that those who are doing more for the war effort deserve more. You wonder also if there was some work Seita could have done to help that he wasn’t doing. Teenagers are hard, but it does surprise that the aunt or someone wouldn’t make sure a little girl has all she needs. Also surprising that the doctor diagnoses malnutrition and just says, “Next.” Maybe everyone was really that short on food that there was nothing to do?
This film also reminded me of a bunch of later anime. The scenes in the train reminded me of Evangelion. Brother and sister alone: Weathering with You. Moving out on your own in rural spot: Wolf Children. There is even a little fish toy that appears for a second which is identical to one that has a prominent appearance in Turn A Gundam. Also, the depiction of starvation reminded me of Sanji’s backstory in One Piece.
I’m going to hit send without reviewing this comment for fear that I’ll accidentally erase it all, but thank you for sharing this one! Even though I read your whole post before I watched it, it was an entirely new experience.
man, you utterly killed it with this review!!! alex dudok de wit’s book is fire and i'm so glad you ref'd it here... you really hit all the substance and put a cone around every pothole that reviewers tend to hit. seriously fantastic work!!!
takahata in interviews is unsympathetic toward seita to a degree that almost beggars belief (saying, essentially, that he sucks because he reacts to everything like a modern child would, fuck them kids). i genuinely have no idea if he's fronting, or what his damage is. you don't accidentally make a character this nuanced and sympathetic.
toshio okada did a video review (i think the translated version is partly paywalled? it's been a minute) in which he infers from one shot that seita ate the remainder of the watermelon after setsuko's death, then cites kuleshov effect to essentially say, gee, if you look really really closely, there's no evidence that seita is sad about these events at all -- you're just projecting that onto him as the viewer. bro, what? is your next gotcha going to be about how these still pictures aren't really moving? 'he ate the watermelon.' my god, these receipts. seita is my little meow meow, cope harder.
i may have ranted about this before, in which case, please indulge me, but nosaka had so much guilt from his own experiences that the short story was written as a fix-it fic for his life. the fix, in a nutshell: seita makes every effort to save his sister before himself, *doesn't* beat her unconscious for crying, and finally, does the proper thing after his failure and dies. even in his later years, nosaka seems to be on his "i'm kind of a piece of shit, huh. i probably should have died" even in interviews totally unrelated to this work (source: my friend verbally translating tv discussions to me in real time.... sorry lol)
growing up in the wake of the immense futile play-act of wartime nationalism that you capture so beautifully here, nosaka and his generation experienced a total collapse of trust in adults or any authority, which is why i find it interesting that after nosaka spent so many years in the artsy edgelord literary bad-boy posture that he never really shed (clinging to an eternal adolescence? refusing to become part of the corrupt adult establishment?) he went into politics in his later years. there was some family basis for this, but other than that... seems like it breaks the facade a bit, right? there isn't as much about him available to read in english as i wish. ok now i'm done.
That Okada quote is crazy. He doesn't even have the excuse that I'd give Takahata, which is that it's not always possible for people to be kind to their past self that survived something terrible. One thing I thought watching this is that I've never really experienced hunger—I've just been hungry sometimes. So that shot about the watermelon is like… yes, he does eat it, because he's dying of starvation. He probably eats the rest of the food he buys too. Then he doesn't have anymore food. Then he dies. His last word's are his sister's name! Now I'm mad lol.
I also wish there was more stuff about Nosaka in English. I feel like I keep running into the limits of what one can do with just English and no Japanese, and while I'm not going to learn Japanese to write better Substack posts, I do think about it. A while ago I thought to myself that the Year 24 Group would be an interesting non-fiction project for the far future but obviously that would require learning Japanese (I mean, it would even if the bulk of their work had been translated, but it very much has not).
One of the few movies I don’t think I could ever watch again. I remember very well seeing it in my freshman year dorm room with a few friends. When it ended, no one even talked. We all just went to bed.
It's so intense… The thought of Japanese schoolchildren going from this movie straight into the opening credits of Totoro continues to haunt me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdUD3TUxR5E
I essayed Grave of the Fireflies many years ago, but had to turn it off early on, for reasons you can no doubt understand. Thanks for the summary, now I never have to watch it. But I do remember the animation was remarkable.
i watched this movie in high school - by the memory of which house i watched it in, i couldn't have been more than sixteen - and have not been able to bring myself to revisit it since, because of... well... y'know. i was surprised by how familiar it felt reading about it here, which probably says something to the movie's credit, but i would not describe it as a movie whose particulars i remembered very well.
so your note on the question of fault was interesting, because i would say that maybe the number one thing i remembered about watching the movie was the sense that what made it so emotionally unbearable was the idea that setsuko's death was in some ways seita's "fault" - not in the sense of moral culpability but in the sense that... hm... the movie does not foreclose the possibility that if seita had made different choices, setsuko would have lived. (to my recollection it suggests this pretty strongly - and it seems de wit's reading suggests that's true - but i don't remember the specifics well enough to assert so myself.) this stuck with me i think because to me it seemed a level of unbearable beyond what i had expected going into a famously extremely sad movie that tells you in the opening scene it's about watching two children die. i don't think i made any connection to the movie's societal criticism at the time, and i certainly didn't "blame" seita for what happens. i just felt: how awful to watch your sister starve to death; how much more unfathomably brutal to watch her die and think that maybe you could have prevented it. would that really matter, in a circumstance so horrific? i'm fortunate enough to say i'm not sure. but that was how i felt at the time - possibly, it occurs to me now, because i am also an older sibling, and i would have been around seita's age when i watched it (although i felt much older than the character i was watching- but that's kind of the trick of that age; he felt older than he was, too).
i don't think i cried watching it either, but i welled up reading and thinking about it now... i'm historically also not a big movie crier but i seem to become more sensitive to certain things with age and i wonder if i'd cry now. (reading your reflections on it and taking some time to reflect myself has given me a fresh appreciation for it that almost makes me want to brave it again but... i mean...) but also what does make me cry is not really correlated with anything as easily identifiable as "sadness"... the last movie that made me cry was one i mention because i think you said you're planning to cover this director in this series at some point - satoshi kon's millennium actress, which had me weeping at a critical moment - but not because i was sad.
I think I'm more receptive to the way you put things here than I was reading the book. I agree that it does not "foreclose the possibility." We just don't know what would have happened if they'd tried to go back. (Setsuko is already showing signs of malnutrition at the aunt's house.…) When I rewatched the movie, when a farmer suggests that Seita swallow his pride and go back to the aunt, I instantly thought "that's impossible," because I thought she would not take them back. I kept thinking of the part where she yells at Setsuko for crying in her sleep. (De Wit is sort of like—if Takahata didn't want people to blame the aunt, maybe he should have given her one good personality trait lol.)
Millennium Actress is a great movie and it's funny that it is also one of the handful of movies here that directly touches on WWII. I actually thought of it quite a bit both for that reason and because the way it uses the two interviewers is not totally unlike the way Grave of the Fireflies uses the ghosts.
I think the last movie that made me really cry (or at least the last one I remember, it was a while ago) was You Were Never Really Here, where I cried so hard I actually had to pause it because I couldn't tell what was happening. I tear up easily but for some reason actually crying is hard for me.
Though I know our local library had this when I was in high school, this evening was the first time I watched it. I didn’t cry (though I tend to), but I had a sinking feeling at many points in the film.
Setsuko is so charming, and it’s portrayed well from her little voice to her little movements. If anything was going to make me cry, it would have been all the time she cried. The sight of that rash was hard to see too.
Even if Seita was “selfish,” it’s kind of moot as it looks like his aunt’s house is destroyed in one of the later bombings. I have a relative who (to me) inexplicably broke communication with certain family members. To my mind, it is entirely irrational and I’ve tried to press the point a couple times, but the only outcome was eventually becoming convinced that something in her psyche just made it impossible to be around them. I could see this sort of thing happening to Seita. Sure, add up the pros and cons, but at some point it was just too much for him to keep living there when there was any other way.
As awful as she is, I still have some sympathy with the aunt too. It’s hard to take in orphans, and it makes sense that those who are doing more for the war effort deserve more. You wonder also if there was some work Seita could have done to help that he wasn’t doing. Teenagers are hard, but it does surprise that the aunt or someone wouldn’t make sure a little girl has all she needs. Also surprising that the doctor diagnoses malnutrition and just says, “Next.” Maybe everyone was really that short on food that there was nothing to do?
This film also reminded me of a bunch of later anime. The scenes in the train reminded me of Evangelion. Brother and sister alone: Weathering with You. Moving out on your own in rural spot: Wolf Children. There is even a little fish toy that appears for a second which is identical to one that has a prominent appearance in Turn A Gundam. Also, the depiction of starvation reminded me of Sanji’s backstory in One Piece.
I’m going to hit send without reviewing this comment for fear that I’ll accidentally erase it all, but thank you for sharing this one! Even though I read your whole post before I watched it, it was an entirely new experience.
man, you utterly killed it with this review!!! alex dudok de wit’s book is fire and i'm so glad you ref'd it here... you really hit all the substance and put a cone around every pothole that reviewers tend to hit. seriously fantastic work!!!
takahata in interviews is unsympathetic toward seita to a degree that almost beggars belief (saying, essentially, that he sucks because he reacts to everything like a modern child would, fuck them kids). i genuinely have no idea if he's fronting, or what his damage is. you don't accidentally make a character this nuanced and sympathetic.
toshio okada did a video review (i think the translated version is partly paywalled? it's been a minute) in which he infers from one shot that seita ate the remainder of the watermelon after setsuko's death, then cites kuleshov effect to essentially say, gee, if you look really really closely, there's no evidence that seita is sad about these events at all -- you're just projecting that onto him as the viewer. bro, what? is your next gotcha going to be about how these still pictures aren't really moving? 'he ate the watermelon.' my god, these receipts. seita is my little meow meow, cope harder.
i may have ranted about this before, in which case, please indulge me, but nosaka had so much guilt from his own experiences that the short story was written as a fix-it fic for his life. the fix, in a nutshell: seita makes every effort to save his sister before himself, *doesn't* beat her unconscious for crying, and finally, does the proper thing after his failure and dies. even in his later years, nosaka seems to be on his "i'm kind of a piece of shit, huh. i probably should have died" even in interviews totally unrelated to this work (source: my friend verbally translating tv discussions to me in real time.... sorry lol)
growing up in the wake of the immense futile play-act of wartime nationalism that you capture so beautifully here, nosaka and his generation experienced a total collapse of trust in adults or any authority, which is why i find it interesting that after nosaka spent so many years in the artsy edgelord literary bad-boy posture that he never really shed (clinging to an eternal adolescence? refusing to become part of the corrupt adult establishment?) he went into politics in his later years. there was some family basis for this, but other than that... seems like it breaks the facade a bit, right? there isn't as much about him available to read in english as i wish. ok now i'm done.
thank you so much for this amazing review!!!!
That Okada quote is crazy. He doesn't even have the excuse that I'd give Takahata, which is that it's not always possible for people to be kind to their past self that survived something terrible. One thing I thought watching this is that I've never really experienced hunger—I've just been hungry sometimes. So that shot about the watermelon is like… yes, he does eat it, because he's dying of starvation. He probably eats the rest of the food he buys too. Then he doesn't have anymore food. Then he dies. His last word's are his sister's name! Now I'm mad lol.
I also wish there was more stuff about Nosaka in English. I feel like I keep running into the limits of what one can do with just English and no Japanese, and while I'm not going to learn Japanese to write better Substack posts, I do think about it. A while ago I thought to myself that the Year 24 Group would be an interesting non-fiction project for the far future but obviously that would require learning Japanese (I mean, it would even if the bulk of their work had been translated, but it very much has not).
One of the few movies I don’t think I could ever watch again. I remember very well seeing it in my freshman year dorm room with a few friends. When it ended, no one even talked. We all just went to bed.
i could not bear it
It's so intense… The thought of Japanese schoolchildren going from this movie straight into the opening credits of Totoro continues to haunt me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdUD3TUxR5E
I essayed Grave of the Fireflies many years ago, but had to turn it off early on, for reasons you can no doubt understand. Thanks for the summary, now I never have to watch it. But I do remember the animation was remarkable.
It really is! The acting for Setsuko is very good too—she's played by a real child (rather than a child pretending to be an adult).
i watched this movie in high school - by the memory of which house i watched it in, i couldn't have been more than sixteen - and have not been able to bring myself to revisit it since, because of... well... y'know. i was surprised by how familiar it felt reading about it here, which probably says something to the movie's credit, but i would not describe it as a movie whose particulars i remembered very well.
so your note on the question of fault was interesting, because i would say that maybe the number one thing i remembered about watching the movie was the sense that what made it so emotionally unbearable was the idea that setsuko's death was in some ways seita's "fault" - not in the sense of moral culpability but in the sense that... hm... the movie does not foreclose the possibility that if seita had made different choices, setsuko would have lived. (to my recollection it suggests this pretty strongly - and it seems de wit's reading suggests that's true - but i don't remember the specifics well enough to assert so myself.) this stuck with me i think because to me it seemed a level of unbearable beyond what i had expected going into a famously extremely sad movie that tells you in the opening scene it's about watching two children die. i don't think i made any connection to the movie's societal criticism at the time, and i certainly didn't "blame" seita for what happens. i just felt: how awful to watch your sister starve to death; how much more unfathomably brutal to watch her die and think that maybe you could have prevented it. would that really matter, in a circumstance so horrific? i'm fortunate enough to say i'm not sure. but that was how i felt at the time - possibly, it occurs to me now, because i am also an older sibling, and i would have been around seita's age when i watched it (although i felt much older than the character i was watching- but that's kind of the trick of that age; he felt older than he was, too).
i don't think i cried watching it either, but i welled up reading and thinking about it now... i'm historically also not a big movie crier but i seem to become more sensitive to certain things with age and i wonder if i'd cry now. (reading your reflections on it and taking some time to reflect myself has given me a fresh appreciation for it that almost makes me want to brave it again but... i mean...) but also what does make me cry is not really correlated with anything as easily identifiable as "sadness"... the last movie that made me cry was one i mention because i think you said you're planning to cover this director in this series at some point - satoshi kon's millennium actress, which had me weeping at a critical moment - but not because i was sad.
I think I'm more receptive to the way you put things here than I was reading the book. I agree that it does not "foreclose the possibility." We just don't know what would have happened if they'd tried to go back. (Setsuko is already showing signs of malnutrition at the aunt's house.…) When I rewatched the movie, when a farmer suggests that Seita swallow his pride and go back to the aunt, I instantly thought "that's impossible," because I thought she would not take them back. I kept thinking of the part where she yells at Setsuko for crying in her sleep. (De Wit is sort of like—if Takahata didn't want people to blame the aunt, maybe he should have given her one good personality trait lol.)
Millennium Actress is a great movie and it's funny that it is also one of the handful of movies here that directly touches on WWII. I actually thought of it quite a bit both for that reason and because the way it uses the two interviewers is not totally unlike the way Grave of the Fireflies uses the ghosts.
I think the last movie that made me really cry (or at least the last one I remember, it was a while ago) was You Were Never Really Here, where I cried so hard I actually had to pause it because I couldn't tell what was happening. I tear up easily but for some reason actually crying is hard for me.