If you haven’t
seen Isao Takahata’s Grave of the
Fireflies, you should. It’s one of the most intense experiences in film
history. It shows the troubled lives of 14-year old Seita and his 4-year old
sister Setsuko as they try to survive in post-WWII Japan, when everything is in
ruins. Because of its powerful scenes, Fireflies
has often been interpreted as an anti-war film. Several critics and Takahata
himself have challenged this notion however. Here, I would like to briefly
explain Takahata’s point of view and respond to it.
Takahata explained that part of his
desire to turn the original novel by Akiyuki Nosaka into a film came from the
fact that Seita was an average, normal teenage boy. He says that many war films
tend to feature characters who, despite the dangerous circumstances, act as
heroes. According to Takahata, this instills an inferiority complex within the
viewer, who watches these characters act noble and brave, while simultaneously
feeling he could never act so heroic. This would create a huge gap between
character and audience. The audience would never be able to fully empathize
with them, to put themselves in their shoes. Takahata thus felt he could dispel
this mindset by making Fireflies.
After the film was released and was
a success, many labelled it an anti-war film. Takahata disagreed: “[The film]
is not at all an anti-war anime and contains absolutely no such message.” Quite
the contrary. The intention was to show how Seita (and thus Japan’s teens and
twenty-somethings) bring about their own deaths by not respecting their elders
(Seita’s aunt) who were then experiencing a great time of peril. Seita’s aunt
is shown to be a bit selfish, blaming Seita for not pulling his own weight, and
so Seita leaves with Setsuko to try and make it on their own. He fails however,
bringing about the death of his sister and eventually his own. So, according to
Takahata, the point is not to show the horrors of war as experienced by Seita
and Setsuko, but to chastise Seita for not empathizing with his aunt, trying to
see that she was suffering too and staying with her, despite her flaws.
The problem here is that it asks the
audience to negate the emotional
effect of the scenes showing Seita and Setsuko’s day-by-day existence, to logically look at the film from a meta-perspective
and judge Seita for putting Setsuko through this ordeal. There are several
problems here. One, as Takahata also states, we see everything through Seita’s
eyes: “even objective passages are filtered through his feelings.” Naturally,
we sympathize and empathize with the main character, the one through who we see
and experience everything. This, combined with the film’s emotional intensity
and scenes in which Seita and Setsuko are struggling to survive, makes it very
hard if not impossible to blame Seita for anything, to blame him for not
putting up with his aunt. Quite the contrary. Seita and Setsuko are basically
children and there is his aunt, who blames him for not putting food on the
table, even though he does. We immediately share Seita’s anger at the situation
and understand why he leaves.
There’s also the issue of
‘respecting one’s elders.’ According to Takahata, Seita (and by default, the
young people of Japan) should have respected his elders as they were suffering
too after the war. They were having the same problems as Seita, trying to
survive on a day by day basis. The problem is that Fireflies does little to promote this point of view. We only see
the aunt in a few scenes and she becomes increasingly frustrated with having to
provide for Seita and Setsuko. Towards the end, she even chastises Seita for
playing the piano for Setsuko: “Don’t you realize there’s a war going on?” In
such a harsh social environment, it’s understandable Seita decides to take his
chances elsewhere. My point is that if Seita is to respect his aunt because
she’s struggling too, there should be scenes where we can care for her, that
show a side of her we can relate, to create an emotional connection between us
and her. And there is none, because, as mentioned earlier, we only see
everything through Seita’s eyes and thus we see the aunt mostly as an
increasing source of frustration. Realizing she’s living a hard life too again
requires you to rationalize her behavior from a meta-perspective and it’s
unlikely anyone watching this (for the first time at least) will do that,
because we’re too busy sympathizing with Seita and Setsuko.
Also, a term that keeps returning is that Seita should
have ‘put up’ with his aunt. This conflicts with the notion of respecting your
elders. Respect means appreciating someone for certain values, etc. ‘Putting up
with’ someone means being around someone for your benefit even if you don’t
want to. One might say that Seita should have put up with his aunt as that
would have increased his and Setsuko’s chances of survival, but this conflicts
with Takahata’s intention of showing how Seita (and Japan’s youngsters) should
have respected his aunt (elders),
because they were going through a dark period as well. This comes back to the
fact that, unlike the countless scenes through which we can sympathize with
Seita and Setsuko, we aren’t pushed to achieve Takahata’s point of view, a
point of view through which we heavily sympathize with the aunt.
Also, there’s an inherent conflict between Takahata’s
reasons behind filming Fireflies and
his intended meaning. As said earlier, he wanted to craft Seita as a
sympathetic teen with whom the audience could identify as an antidote to the
war films that feature heroic characters through which the audience would
develop an inferiority complex. On the other hand, Takahata stated he wanted
the Japanese in their teens and twenties to respect their elders for what they
went through in WWII. The aunt is key here as she’s the one Seita should have
respected and stayed with to survive. We are thus not supposed to sympathize
with Seita, but chastise him for not putting up with his aunt, as this led
directly to Setsuko’s death. So, on the one hand we are to sympathize with
Seita, but on the other hand we should blame him for not putting up with the
aunt and subsequently for Setsuko’s death. This is the key conflict as to why
many viewers interpreted Fireflies as
an anti-war film. Too many responded emotionally to Seita and Setsuko’s
ordeals, because Takahata did not emphasize his intended meaning enough. It
becomes hard to arrive at the conclusion that Seita should have respected and
stayed with the aunt – even though logically
it makes sense and there are enough scenes that show how in this way he failed
to care for Setsuko – when most of what we see emotionally compels us to sympathize with him.
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