Grave Of The Fireflies

Year: 1988

Grade: B+

Country: Japan

Director: Takahata

Review

anime film that takes place in japan during WWII. the story revolves around two children – an older boy and his young sister. this film is everything that “spirited away” aspired (and was rumored) to be. i don’t know where to start. first of all make sure you watch it with the japanese speech and english subtitles…sometimes that doesn’t matter with anime, but in this case the english version seemed to add a lot of incidental speech (especially in crowd scenes). this is important because the film is so visual that adding people saying superfluous things just takes away from the visual emphasis of the film. that’s one thing that’s bad about a lot of films in the modern era – they don’t know when to shut up. sometimes it’s nice to just let the picture tell the story and this film does a very good job of that. despite being animated, the characters take on all the life and depth of a good real life character. this is achieved in a couple ways – the filmmakers make an effort to fill in the spaces that are generally left blank by animated features – they show the surroundings of the characters to a greater extent and they show the characters doing everyday tasks like going to the bathroom or washing their faces. they also animate the characters in a remarkably realistic way – again focusing on the minutiae: twitches, the angling of a character’s head when they ask a question, characters scratching themselves, etc. instead of being static when they’re not actively engaged in an activity. when real people sit and relax they still move, and the animators have captured that here. they also did a great job of writing for the characters. each character is very well rounded and their relation to each other is well-defined. from the beginning the brother and sister clearly are very close and have the quality of chemistry that we generally reserve for gable/colbert or bogart/bacall. things like the separation between the responsibility of the brother and the youthful ignorance of the child are well-portrayed. he (like the father in life is beautiful) tries mightily to keep her world as innocent as possible and there are several instances/symbols of this throughout the film. there’s a lot to say about this film, but suffice it to say that you should check it out.