Grave of the Fireflies 9781838719227, 9781838719241

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Acknowledgments I am indebted to Rebecca Barden and her colleagues at Bloomsbury for expertly guiding an untried author. Many people sharpened my words and ideas by discussing the film with me or giving feedback on my manuscript. I am especially grateful to Ilan Nguyên, Yasu Kawata, Cat Philps, Jonathan Clements, L. Halliday Piel and two anonymous readers of my first draft. Carys Gaskin at StudioCanal was tirelessly helpful with sourcing images, and Sophie Contento turned my plain Word documents into a beautiful book. I thank them both. Merci, maman et papa. Thank you, Bryony. Author’s note Japanese names in this book are presented in the Western order, surname last. Quotations of the film’s dialogue are taken from the English subtitles on StudioCanal’s 2013 Blu-ray release, which are accurate enough for the purposes of my analysis. All other translations are mine, except where otherwise stated.

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Acknowledgments I am indebted to Rebecca Barden and her colleagues at Bloomsbury for expertly guiding an untried author. Many people sharpened my words and ideas by discussing the film with me or giving feedback on my manuscript. I am especially grateful to Ilan Nguyên, Yasu Kawata, Cat Philps, Jonathan Clements, L. Halliday Piel and two anonymous readers of my first draft. Carys Gaskin at StudioCanal was tirelessly helpful with sourcing images, and Sophie Contento turned my plain Word documents into a beautiful book. I thank them both. Merci, maman et papa. Thank you, Bryony. Author’s note Japanese names in this book are presented in the Western order, surname last. Quotations of the film’s dialogue are taken from the English subtitles on StudioCanal’s 2013 Blu-ray release, which are accurate enough for the purposes of my analysis. All other translations are mine, except where otherwise stated.

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Introduction: Japanese Suffering, Japanese Guilt In March 1945, as the Pacific War entered its endgame,1 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 sister and mother, who was severely burned; his father was never seen again.2 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 (Hotaru no haka, 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-yearold Isao Takahata found his home empty but for his older sister.3 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

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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 towards realising that vision, with a medium – animation – that resolved the problems of adaptation. His film, for which he also wrote the screenplay, is broadly faithful to the novella. Yet just as Nosaka lightly fictionalised his experiences in his writing, Takahata made further adjustments. The significance of these various changes will be examined in the chapters ahead; for now, a synopsis of the film already reveals a few divergences from Nosaka’s life. Fourteen-year-old Seita and his fouryear-old sister Setsuko lose their mother and home in the Kobe raid; with their father at sea, they move in with a distant relative, whose hostility prompts them to live instead in an unused bomb shelter; for want of food, their health deteriorates; Setsuko dies shortly after the war’s end, Seita a month later. 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 US distributor described it as ‘a three-handkerchief movie on a scale of one to three’,4 and audience reactions bear this claim out: viewers young and old are often reduced to tears. One lecturer confessed to breaking down while merely describing the film to

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his students. In her review, a critic detailed her struggle to hold it together in the cinema: ‘I was on the verge of tears, which I stopped by holding a handkerchief to my eyes. That prevented them from streaming out. As I’d promised myself before heading out, I managed not to weep during the screening …’5 When Fireflies came out in Japan in 1988, Ghibli – the animation studio Takahata launched with fellow film-maker Hayao Miyazaki – was barely established in the country and all but unknown elsewhere. Overseas distribution was peripheral to its business model (a crucial consideration when analysing the film’s themes, as we shall see). But as Ghibli gained immense global renown in the following years, so did Fireflies; in some territories, it was among the studio’s earliest releases and helped create that renown. It has assumed places in the canons of both animation and war cinema – a rare distinction. In 2018, USA Today sought to determine the greatest animated film of all time by aggregating user and critic scores on the websites IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes; Fireflies came top.6 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 criticised, 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. This book will explore what the film set out to do, what it achieved, and what was lost along the way. Conflicted memories The war may have been an unconventional subject for Japanese animation in the 1980s, but half a century earlier, the medium had thrived as an organ of military propaganda. The 1930s saw Japan

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embark on a phase of colonial adventurism, its forces occupying territories across Asia and the Pacific with great speed and violence. The country’s expansion was buttressed by an ultra-nationalism founded on a notion of racial superiority and centred on a cult of the emperor. This ideology was reinforced at home through propaganda issued by an increasingly illiberal state. Throughout the period, and especially after Japan provoked a war with the US in 1941, the country’s animators were mobilised to create works that extolled the virtues of the Japanese Empire. Their efforts culminated in the production of Japan’s first animated feature, Mitsuyo Seo’s Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro¯ Umi no shinpei, 1945), a rousing allegory in which a folkloric hero leads a squadron of anthropomorphic animals in a fight against the dastardly Allies. But the film was only finished in April 1945, by which time the firebombing was under way and society was in disarray. It was little seen and swiftly forgotten (until its surprise rediscovery four decades later). Within months, the war was over, and so was the empire. Thus began the US’s near-seven-year occupation of Japan. The Americans moved fast to imbue society with a spirit of forwardlooking pacifism. They enacted a constitution that abolished the country’s right to wage war, and censored public discussion of the recent conflict in the interest of preserving ‘public tranquility’.7 Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (1945)

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Blame for Japan’s aggression was pinned on a handful of wartime leaders, who were purged in a trial of dubious legitimacy. Emperor Hirohito, their supreme commander in name at least, was granted immunity: the official line was that he’d been manipulated and misled by an unchecked militaristic regime, as had the Japanese people at large. Damasareta was the watchword: ‘we were tricked’. Unsurprisingly, this idea was widely accepted across the country. As the occupation went on, however, its initial ideals gave way to Cold War realpolitik. With conflict spreading across the Korean peninsula, Japan started to look like an essential ally in the fight against communism. Encouraged by the US, the country rearmed to create the so-called Self-Defense Forces. These still exist today, and although legally restricted to non-aggressive activities, they have grown to become one of the world’s most well-funded militaries. The vast majority of Japanese people experienced the war from the home front, with its air raids and other horrors. Meanwhile, their country wreaked great suffering – and caused far more deaths than it suffered8 – in a war of conquest which very few of them seriously resisted (although civilians couldn’t have known the scale of atrocities being committed on their behalf). Under the occupation, the populace was suddenly required to exchange the ideals of imperialism for those of peace and internationalism; the US took steps to deflect public attention from the thorny issue of war guilt, while sanctioning rearmament. This painful, contradictory legacy set the tone for debate about the war in the decades to come: while the principle of pacifism has retained widespread support, Japan remains conflicted in its ways of remembering and interpreting this part of its history. The ideological spectrum runs from apologists for empire to progressives who speak of collective responsibility for the war. While the Allied nations can construe their war as a righteous battle against fascism, Japan has settled on no such unifying narrative. This plurality of views is reflected in its live-action films, which have portrayed the period from various perspectives. Yet cinema is where a tendency often expressed in other parts of war discourse

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is most salient: the sidelining of Japanese guilt. Most mainstream films about the conflict centre on figures of innocence, be they helpless civilians or powerless rank-and-file fighters, and emphasise the sacrifices made by the nation as defeat approached. In other words, they manifest what has been termed ‘victim consciousness’, privileging Japanese suffering over Japanese violence. This slant is apparent in towering classics like Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes (Niju¯ shi no hitomi, 1954) and Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto, 1956, remade in 1985). The country also has an intermittently lively tradition of patriotic blockbusters that glorify the exploits of the armed forces, such as those produced by the studio Shinto¯ho¯ in the 1950s. Philip A. Seaton points out that the financial stakes are higher in cinema than other media; this incentivises the creation of films with popular appeal, which translates into sympathetic characters who are vulnerable or brave in battle.9 While these are broad generalisations, it’s true that Japan’s mainstream fiction cinema has rarely probed the subject of responsibility – individual or collective – for its aggression. For decades after defeat, Japanese animation (anime) avoided the war almost entirely. As the industry recovered, it focused on creating family entertainment. This didn’t stop some film-makers from addressing real-life conflicts indirectly: for instance, Takahata’s own The Little Norse Prince (Taiyo¯ no o¯ji Horusu no daibo¯ken, 1968) allegorised the Vietnam War. But as anime’s audience matured and diversified, the Pacific War began to seep in. Epochal works like Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato (Uchu¯ senkan Yamato, 1974–5) ¯ tomo’s Akira (1988) blatantly borrowed from its and Katsuhiro O iconography. The short film Pica-don (1978), by Renzo¯ and Sayoko Kinoshita, made waves in festival circles with its unflinching depiction of the grotesque physical effects of Hiroshima’s atom bomb. Its imagery was echoed in Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen, 1983), a feature based on Keiji Nakazawa’s autobiographical manga about the bomb and its aftermath. In short, when Fireflies was greenlit in 1986, anime that explicitly addressed Japan’s defeat was just starting to be made.

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Pica-don (1978)

Barefoot Gen (1983)

More than these films, another cinematic event of the period made a deep impression on Takahata. The propaganda feature Momotaro, Sacred Sailors had long been thought destroyed or lost in the confusion of defeat, but a print was rediscovered in a studio warehouse in 1983 and the film was screened for the first time since the war. Takahata perceived that some young viewers were too ignorant of their country’s history to fully grasp its function as propaganda. When the context was explained to them, they assumed that the production team must have been decent, war-hating people who were forced to work against their will. A dismayed Takahata concluded that these youngsters ‘knew nothing at all’.10

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More generally, the director had grown concerned about the shape his society was taking. Postwar Japan had staged a stunning economic comeback (not least due to the Korean War, from which it profited massively by selling military and other supplies to the US). By the 1980s, it was the second-largest economy in the world, and predicted by some to overtake even the US. The country had transformed in four decades: industry had proliferated, cities had ballooned and observers abroad were remarking on its seemingly foolproof model of capitalism with both admiration and alarm. These changes gave Japan a newfound confidence on the world stage, but they worried Takahata. Far from healing a war-torn country, the relentless pursuit of wealth seemed to him to have undermined some of Japan’s most valuable traditions and engendered a cultural crisis. In particular, he believed that young people, pampered by consumerism, were losing their sense of social responsibility. Strikingly, he saw parallels between this problem and the fate of Seita and Setsuko. Other events in the 1980s served to place war memories at the heart of current affairs. Politics had taken a nationalist turn under the hawkish Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who caused an uproar by paying an official visit to a shrine where the souls of war criminals are commemorated. Meanwhile, controversy erupted over the prospect of school textbooks being revised to downplay Japanese atrocities. These incidents were backlit by the twilight of Hirohito’s reign – for the emperor was now in his eighties. The person who held greater symbolic responsibility for the war than anyone else would soon be gone, and the looming end of a tumultuous era may have informed the production of Fireflies. Takahata’s feature is a sensitive reading of its source novella, and a comparative analysis of the two sheds light on the director’s agenda. Yet the film is the product of a different time and creative mind, made in a medium that implicates specific technology and a vast team of artists. Their input helped to reshape and amplify the intimate drama at the heart of the story, turning the film into

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an emotional experience quite unlike the book. At the same time, responding to the upheavals of his age, Takahata sought to develop a vein of social commentary. He didn’t want his viewers to cry so much as to engage in the sort of self-reflection he found to be lacking in contemporary Japan. By and large, the audience preferred to cry. Which leads us back to the great irony of Fireflies: it is widely praised yet somewhat misunderstood – on Takahata’s terms. Of course, no director has a monopoly on their film’s meaning and all viewers legitimately form their own interpretation. If this book puts Takahata’s intentions to the fore, it isn’t to suggest that they constitute the only way to understand Fireflies. But because these intentions have rarely been considered (at least in English-language scholarship), they are worth describing in detail. Moreover, they merit attention because Takahata’s ‘failure’ to convey his message to so many viewers tells us something about the film’s other qualities. And as the last chapter will show, these matters contextualise the political campaigning the director pursued in his later years. Takahata welcomed diverse interpretations of the film, telling one audience, ‘With this film, I personally didn’t really intend to lead the viewer in any direction.’11 Even so, he remained ambivalent about the way it was generally received. There is something fitting about this, for beneath the veneer of critical consensus, the film turns out to be a bundle of paradoxes: a work of groundbreaking animation directed by a non-animator; a box-office mediocrity with a considerable influence; one half of an utterly unorthodox double bill; a masterpiece that almost derailed its director’s career; a tragedy that celebrates the beauty of existence; a historical drama that is, first and foremost, about the present day. Fireflies in all its contradictions is what this book is about.

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1 The Production: A Monster and a Grave From day one, Takahata kept his distance from the studio he helped launch. At Ghibli’s registration ceremony in June 1984,12 he refused to sign the official paperwork, telling Miyazaki – who was ready to sign – that an artist had no business putting his name on such documents. And so, contrary to received wisdom, Takahata technically didn’t co-found the studio. Rather than hold a formal title within Ghibli, he said he wanted to be seen as something like a ‘playwright in residence’. Takahata’s little rebellion proved prophetic. Both he and Miyazaki made all their subsequent features at Ghibli, but the studio grew more closely associated in the public imagination with Miyazaki, a prolific film-maker and charismatic media presence. Through a string of monumental blockbusters, his personal style came to be identified with the Ghibli brand. Meanwhile, Takahata gently subverted that brand with a handful of narratively and visually experimental features, culminating in the radical abstractions of his swansong, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Kaguya-hime no monogatari, 2013). With this work, he literally distanced himself from Ghibli, relocating production to a satellite studio while Miyazaki occupied the main building. As often as not, Takahata’s features disappointed at the box office, and in later years he expressed gratitude to Miyazaki for effectively subsidising his film-making. In a sense, Miyazaki was only repaying a debt. His own career owed much to Takahata, five years his senior, who spotted his talent early on and became his mentor of sorts. The pair met in the 1960s at Toei Animation, a pioneering studio that aspired to establish itself as the ‘Disney of the East’ with its lavishly produced features. Takahata had started at the company as an assistant director, Miyazaki as a lowly in-betweener.13 Having built a rapport through union activities,

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they collaborated on Takahata’s debut feature as director, The Little Norse Prince, an epic tale of mythological derring-do. Miyazaki served chiefly as an animator and layout artist,14 displaying his formidable abilities as a draughtsman – a great asset to Takahata, whose own talents did not really extend to drawing. Their collaboration endured throughout the 1970s, when they left Toei to make TV series and specials for various studios. Takahata directed and Miyazaki played key roles in visual development and production. With Heidi, Girl of the Alps (Arupusu no sho¯jo Haiji, 1974), they embarked on a run of serials based on classic Western novels, which eschewed the high fantasy of their Toei work in favour of rich explorations of social and psychological themes: poverty, xenophobia, urbanisation, the anxieties of early adulthood. These were novel themes for TV anime, and the series raised the medium’s production values about as high as they could go; Takahata and Miyazaki chafed at the constant deadlines and financial constraints. Their creative partnership frayed as Miyazaki’s own directorial career took off in the late 1970s. Meanwhile, Takahata directed two acclaimed features, Chie the Brat (Jarinko Chie, 1981) and Gauche the Cellist (Sero hiki no Go¯shu, 1982), without his old comrade. But they were reunited when Miyazaki called on Takahata to produce his features Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika, 1984) and Castle in the Sky (Tenku¯ no shiro Rapyuta, 1986). The former’s relative commercial success led to the founding of Ghibli, and the latter became its first release. The studio was established as a division of Tokuma Shoten, a publisher that had branched out into film production by investing in Nausicaä. From the outset, Ghibli defined itself by spurning TV series, franchise films and straight-to-video productions – the staple of most Japanese animation studios – and concentrating on original theatrical features. Following the example of Toei Animation, it committed to producing works with greater detail and fluidity than the cost-cutting ‘limited animation’ that defined the look of so much anime.15 In brief, Ghibli was set up to accommodate the vast creative ambitions of its

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two core directors, Miyazaki and Takahata. As its co-founder Toshio Suzuki said, ‘[Their] wishes were paramount in whatever was done.’16 The riskiness of this high-minded policy was swiftly exposed by the studio’s second project. This anarchic feeling Suzuki started the 1980s as an editor at Animage, Tokuma Shoten’s influential animation periodical. In this capacity, he championed the two directors’ films and enjoyed privileged access to their workplaces, where his strategic instincts established him as an effective behind-thescenes fixer. This role was gradually formalised throughout the decade, until he officially joined Ghibli as a full-time producer in 1989. A film about the Pacific War was first mooted in early 1986, while Takahata was visiting the Animage offices. Suzuki’s boss remarked that children alone had remained lively after defeat, and proposed a feature on this subject. Takahata was taken by the idea, but the search for suitable source material led him and Suzuki to a story with a very different message: Grave of the Fireflies. Nosaka’s searing novella had made a splash on its release in 1967, impressing the literary establishment – it won the prestigious Naoki Prize17 – as well as the teenage Suzuki, who fantasised about entering the film business and adapting it. By 1986, though, the novella was almost out of print. Suzuki proposed an adaptation to Takahata, who agreed. Meanwhile, Castle in the Sky was released in August to moderate success, enabling Ghibli to start work on a follow-up. This was when Miyazaki decided to revive a long-gestating pet project. For around a decade, he’d been mulling a story of a girl communing with forest spirits in the Japanese countryside. He wanted Takahata to direct the film, but Takahata refused: he had no interest in helming a feature written and designed by his colleague.18 Taking the reins himself, Miyazaki presented the idea to Tokuma Shoten’s executives, who had hoped for another action-packed epic in the vein of his previous features. Unable to foresee the vast revenues that My Neighbour

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Totoro (Tonari no Totoro, 1988) would eventually generate through licensing deals, they dismissed Miyazaki’s ‘monster’ (obake) film. Suzuki believed in Totoro. Searching for a way to save the project, he decided to pitch it alongside Takahata’s Fireflies in a double bill. According to some scholars,19 Suzuki’s rationale was that the educational value of a film about the war would draw schoolchildren, guaranteeing both films an audience – in an inversion of the dynamic that was later to develop, Takahata’s film would underwrite Miyazaki’s. However, Suzuki himself has refuted this. Rather, he anticipated that the two directors would be spurred on to do good work by a sense of rivalry. Yet the double bill still failed to convince the executives, whose response was categorical: ‘You idiot! First a monster and now a grave, too?!’20 As it happened, Shinchosha, the venerable publisher of Nosaka’s novella, was planning to break into film production, as Tokuma Shoten had done before it. Hearing this, Suzuki changed tack and convinced Shinchosha that Takahata’s adaptation of their book would be the ideal gateway into the business. If they produced Fireflies, Tokuma Shoten might be persuaded to take on Totoro. The plan hinged on a sly trick of corporate politics: if Shinchosha, as the older company, solicited Tokuma Shoten’s collaboration, the latter would feel obliged to accept. So it proved, and the two publishers struck a deal to co-produce the double bill – an unprecedented arrangement in the industry. This pact didn’t reassure everyone. To¯ru Hara, the experienced producer then serving as Ghibli’s manager, found the plan preposterous. He argued that the young studio was ill-equipped to make two films at once; not even Toei Animation, the vast production house where he had once worked alongside Takahata and Miyazaki, had ever attempted such a thing. In a further blow, the distributor of Miyazaki’s recent features turned the double bill down, explaining that the films didn’t fit its brand. Only after impassioned lobbying by Tokuma Shoten’s president did another company agree to distribute them.

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A promotional pamphlet for the double bill. Reprinted with permission from Masahiro Haraguchi, Archives of Studio Ghibli Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1996), p. 18

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Concept art

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Nosaka himself was initially sceptical, too. He had cause to be: over the years, three attempts to adapt his book in live action had failed for various reasons. Most recently, an extravagant producer had suggested recreating the city of Kobe in the Arizona desert and subjecting it to genuine firebombing; the project collapsed when the producer died. By the time Takahata approached him, Nosaka had concluded that no film could ever convincingly depict the hardships and devastated landscapes of his story – the logistical hurdles were too high. Animation hadn’t even occurred to him: ‘I thought animated features were pleasure viewing for summer vacation. A boy’s adventure, or courage, that sort of thing.’21 Upon seeing Ghibli’s concept art, however, he was stunned by the detail with which his narrative world had been rendered. ‘I realized this could only have been done with animation,’ he told Takahata.22 The core production crew started work in Ghibli’s main premises in January 1987. The double bill’s running time was set at 60 minutes per film and its release was scheduled for 16 April 1988. The combined budget came to approximately one billion yen including advertising – a substantial sum for Japanese animation at the time, though dwarfed by Ghibli’s subsequent budgets. As Suzuki later recalled, ‘I had this anarchic feeling that it didn’t matter if these two films were Ghibli’s last.’23 A sense of reality The pairing of Fireflies with Totoro, an irrepressibly sunny film, may seem inappropriate at first glance. What does the scorched earth of wartime Kobe have to do with Miyazaki’s bucolic wonderland? How can an ode to the freedoms of childhood be billed alongside an elegy for the young victims of war? And in what order should they be shown?24 In fact, the films are bound by numerous narrative and thematic parallels; a full comparative analysis lies outside the scope of this book. What is significant here is that they share a setting: Japan. In this respect, Ghibli was consciously situating the films outside

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anime conventions, which favoured exotic locales and the ambiguous realms of fantasy and sci-fi. Takahata’s and Miyazaki’s own works to this point were mostly set abroad. In their TV series of the 1970s, through assiduous fieldwork and research, they had endeavoured to faithfully evoke locations in Europe and the Americas, and depict the lives of ordinary people therein. With their double bill, they applied the same process to their homeland. Few had tried this before. Yet the Japan of Fireflies and Totoro is a foreign country, too, for it belongs to the past. The former film is set in 1945 and the latter in the mid-1950s, just as Japan was embarking on the phase of rapid economic growth that would change the face of society. By the late 1980s, these transformations were reaching a crescendo; in their own ways, Takahata and Miyazaki were concerned. Promotional material presented the double bill as a statement on the past – and, implicitly, on how it differed from the present. This is the idea behind the films’ joint tagline, ‘We’ve come to return what you lost’ [wasuremono, which can also mean ‘what you forgot’]. But a sentence in the copywriters’ brainstorming notes puts it more bluntly: ‘These two works were born of a great anger with contemporary Japan!’25 As these notes reveal, the copywriters also considered framing the films as slices of ‘Sho¯wa history’. The Sho¯wa era – the period of Hirohito’s reign – had begun with the emperor’s enthronement in 1926 and would end with his death on 7 January 1989. By the mid-1980s, he clearly wasn’t long for this world; during the production of Fireflies, the media reported regularly on his failing health. Imperial reigns are an important paradigm in Japanese historical consciousness, and the sense that one was closing may have stimulated Takahata and Miyazaki to take stock of how the country had changed in that time. At the very least, it influenced the marketing campaign. Fireflies is often held up as a triumph of ‘realism’. It is worth asking what this word means in the context of animation. Liveaction cinema consists in photographic reproductions of real events. Of course, these events are mediated through creative processes like

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framing and editing, which complicate the relationship between the events and the resulting film. Nevertheless, this relationship can serve as the starting point for a definition of ‘realism’ in live action. Animation has no such indexical connection to reality. So how can it be realistic? This subject has been extensively theorised, with different scholars addressing the specificities of different animation mediums; the briefest of overviews will have to do here. It is important to note that realism in animation is not a single tendency, but rather a range of distinct creative approaches that serve, alone or in combination, to bolster the viewer’s impression that what they are watching could happen in the real world. Accordingly, scholars tend to identify various forms of realism. Paul Wells measures the realism of an animated film by its emulation of not just the real world but also classical live-action cinema, looking at factors like the presentation of action and diegetic use of sound as well as the physical laws governing the film’s elements.26 Stephen Rowley, critiquing Wells, looks beyond visual and aural verisimilitude, adding categories of ‘social’ and ‘narrative and character’ realism – conventions related to the plausibility, complexity and internal consistency of the film’s world, events and characters.27 These last categories are particularly useful for analysing Takahata’s works, which feature nuanced protagonists whose quirks, flaws and mannerisms mirror our own. They often depict the dayto-day experiences of normal people, revolving around moments of psychological revelation that help us identify with these people. Fantastical elements are permitted to the extent that they advance the exploration of characters or themes, but rarely, if ever, for the sake of narrative development or sheer spectacle. In other words, Takahata rejected precisely the sort of ‘boy’s adventure’ stories that Nosaka had associated with anime, where courage and romance make for simple solutions to big problems. He thought that enough films of this type were being made already. Far from providing escapism, he aimed to provoke his viewers into

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reflecting on their own lives and societies. He accused Miyazaki of excessively idealising his characters. In return, Miyazaki was said to regard Takahata’s fascination with the detail of reality as a kind of hobby, superfluous to the artistic merit of his films.28 This emphasis on social and psychological truth is at the heart of Takahata’s vaunted ‘realism’, of which Fireflies is arguably the high-water mark. It doesn’t necessarily entail a visual realism. For Fireflies, the director initially intended to experiment with a loose expressionistic style inspired by Frédéric Back, a French-Canadian animator he admired. Lack of time forced him to abandon this approach, which he later revived for My Neighbours the Yamadas (Ho¯hokekyo: Tonari no Yamada-kun, 1999) and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. He settled instead for a refined naturalism: relatively accurate proportions, physically plausible movements and a world that reflects how Japan looked in 1945. Yet this is still animation, and stylisation is inevitable. Similarly, the characters and their environments, for all their authenticity, depart in some ways from what really happened in Nosaka’s life – and indeed from what can happen in our world. These tensions between reality and fiction are central to the film’s power, and will be examined in the next chapter. Takahata’s visual naturalism required an uncompromising attention to detail: he insisted on subtle gestures and expressions, and great accuracy in the recreation of historical and geographical particulars. This kind of animation is tricky – mistakes and inconsistencies are glaring – and the director struggled to find artists capable of meeting his exacting standards. As he wrote during the film’s production: Depicting how humans really move is very difficult. Common gestures from everyday life are described as ‘second-rate acting’; they have come to be seen as a necessary evil required only for the storytelling, unrelated to the charm of animation. Clearly, animators do not enter the industry because they want to draw these kinds of things. As a result, they are not prepared for it, and their powers of observation are superficial.29

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One person who was prepared was Yoshifumi Kondo¯, a gifted artist who had collaborated with Takahata on his series Anne of Green Gables (Akage no An, 1979). Takahata was set on recruiting Kondo¯ as animation director on Fireflies, declaring that the film could not be made without him. However, Miyazaki also wanted him for Totoro. With Kondo¯’s loyalties split, Suzuki stepped in and assigned him to Takahata’s team on the basis that he would be less useful to Miyazaki, who could draw well himself.

Model sheet for Seita

Colour model for Setsuko

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Kondo¯ was tasked with designing the film’s characters to Takahata’s specifications: not stylised, but as Japanese people actually are. This marked a departure from the culturally ambiguous (mukokuseki) aesthetic that prevailed in anime, and the animators had a hard time drawing Kondo¯’s characters. Yoshiyuki Momose developed the concept art alongside Kondo¯ and served as his assistant animation director. Nizo¯ Yamamoto, who had worked on Takahata’s Chie the Brat, came on board as art director, leading the creation of the film’s backgrounds. Another person who was solicited by both Takahata and Miyazaki was Michiyo Yasuda, the colour designer who had first worked with the pair on The Little Norse Prince; she ended up serving on both films. These core artists all went on to have distinguished careers at Ghibli. The scene of the crime It is often said that Takahata didn’t draw. This isn’t quite accurate: he sketched diagrammatic storyboards, using stick figures and symbols such as arrows to illustrate the compositions he envisioned. Every page of his script for Fireflies was accompanied by such sketches, alongside instructions specifying matters like camera movement and shot length. Momose and other trained artists then elaborated these drawings into the final storyboards. What is true is that Takahata couldn’t draw well enough to contribute to his films’ final images; he was certainly no animator. Yet he possessed a keen visual sensibility, overseeing every stage of the development and production of Fireflies. He guided his artists with precise instructions, as Suzuki explains: [T]he directions Takahata gave the animators were also very concrete and practical. He was never vague or abstract. He would never say, ‘In this situation this is the kind of feeling we want to create.’ Rather, he would say, ‘Make the character’s eyes upturned here. Make the eyes rounded there.’ … He knew full well what kind of effect this would produce, and it made the work of the animators that much easier.30

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Underpinning Takahata’s ‘realism’ was an almost fanatical approach to research. As one of the few people on the production to remember the war, he was keen to impress the characteristics of the period on his colleagues. Together, they thoroughly investigated every aspect of the film’s world, from the distinctive tint of Kobe’s soil to the direction from which US’s B-29 bombers approached the city. The director provided his crew with a wealth of reference materials, including poems, photo albums and paintings by Monet. The illustrations of Chihiro Iwasaki, notably in the book Children in the Flames of War (Senka no naka no kodomo-tachi, 1974), were a key influence on the design of Seita and Setsuko. The animators also visited a nursery to study four-year-old girls at play. Meanwhile, the senior artists went to Kobe to scout out the story’s locations; Nosaka himself guided them, struggling with the pain it caused him to revisit these places, so near to what he called ‘the scene of the crime’.31 The film’s naturalism necessitated a new approach to colour. Yasuda believed that the gaudy hues fashionable in anime wouldn’t suit the film’s bombed-out landscapes; gentler, more sober palettes were called for. She created 250 colours, of which she ended up using around 150.32 She gave her characters relatively pale skin tones and brown outlines instead of the traditional black, so as to integrate them more harmoniously into their environments. This last innovation posed a technical problem: the carbon-based machines used to copy animators’ drawings onto cels were adapted to black lines, and proved unreliable when transferring brown ones. The process only became workable after much trial and error, and the invention of a few ad hoc methods (the crew discovered that blowing on the cels helped to make the lines stick). Takahata’s insistence on authenticity extended to the casting. The film’s dialogue is spoken in dialect, so Takahata and his sound director hired actors from Kobe and the surrounding Kansai region. Many came from live-action cinema or the theatre, and had little or no experience in anime. In a highly unusual move, Takahata decided that his young protagonists would be voiced by actors of the same

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Location scouting

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Shiraishi, her voice coach and Tatsumi in the recording studio

age, not adults. Fifteen-year-old Tsutomu Tatsumi was cast as Seita and five-year-old Ayano Shiraishi as Setsuko. Promotional material billed Shiraishi as the youngest actor in anime history.33 The casting of Shiraishi necessitated another break with protocol. In the anime industry, dubbing usually takes place once the animation is more or less complete, the actors synchronising their words to the images. Shiraishi was deemed too young to be able to do this reliably. The crew also worried that her voice might change if they waited. So she recorded the bulk of her part before production began, speaking her lines as a voice coach fed them to her. This approach ensured that her delivery was spontaneous, and the animators drew inspiration from her performance when bringing Setsuko to life. Takahata’s ambitions made huge demands of his team, and the strain began to show. As the film’s running time ballooned from 60 to 88 minutes, the production fell behind schedule. Where once the artists had lavished time on research and experimentation, they now cut corners. The important layout stage was eliminated and animators began to work directly from the storyboard, all the while striving to meet Takahata’s unremittingly high standards. Scenes that had been storyboarded were cut. Visiting the studio in late 1987,

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an Animage reporter noticed a ‘tense’34 atmosphere; when he returned months later, the mood had turned ‘mournful’.35 It became clear that Fireflies would not be finished in time. Takahata’s relationships with his producers soured. Before long, he was barely on speaking terms with Hara, the manager who had opposed the double bill in the first place. Takahata asked Shinchosha to delay the release, but the company’s chief executive, who must have been rueing the day he entered the film business, refused. Eventually, the director simply stopped turning up to work. When a desperate Suzuki came to see him, Takahata surprised his colleague by reciting an anecdote about one of his favourite films, Paul Grimault’s animated feature The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep (La Bergère et le ramoneur, 1952). Takahata explained that, after Grimault repeatedly missed deadlines, his producer released a version completed without his input; through legal proceedings, Grimault obtained the right to display a disclaimer before each screening, stating his disapproval.36 Takahata asked Suzuki whether he could see the way to a similar arrangement. The answer, again, was no. Ultimately, Fireflies came out on time with a few unfinished sections. The sequence in which Seita is beaten for stealing vegetables was left uncoloured. This compromise holds a special irony for a film-maker who would later deploy blank space to sublime stylistic effect in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. At the time, it was merely an embarrassment, the like of which the industry had never seen. Takahata’s reputation was badly dented. Although Fireflies was finally completed one month later, he became unemployable in the animation world, until Miyazaki symbolically lifted the ban by offering to produce his next feature.37 This gesture, which resulted in Only Yesterday (Omohide poroporo, 1991) – the last substantial collaboration between the two men – brought Takahata back into the fold when he was at his most vulnerable. He would spend the rest of his film-making career at the studio he didn’t quite co-found.

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2 The Film: The Lovers’ Journey Of the many differences between Nosaka’s experiences and those of his alter ego Seita, the most obvious is that Nosaka survived. The war over, his sister dead, he spent years drifting between cities, alternating stints at school with spells hustling on the black market. From the 1950s, he found fame first as a screenwriter and lyricist then as a columnist, writing often about the seedy demi-monde of urban nightlife that he frequented. His erotic debut novel, The Pornographers (Erogotoshi-tachi, 1963), cemented his reputation as the enfant terrible of Japanese letters, and displayed the sardonic satirical tone that would mark much of his fiction.38 Nosaka claimed that he almost completely forgot the events of 1945 in the immediate postwar years. By the mid-1960s, however, the traumas of the home front began to intrude into his consciousness – and his writing – in what David C. Stahl characterises as a ‘return of the repressed’.39 Stahl proposes two main reasons for this. Firstly, the Vietnam War was escalating, its air strikes recalling those on Japan; at the same time, Japan’s complicity in this new conflict (through its material and logistical support for the US military) was sparking public discourse about its past aggression. Secondly, Nosaka’s daughter was reaching the age at which his sister had died. The sight of her triggered intense anxiety, with which he initially coped by fleeing home for months and drinking heavily. Eventually, Nosaka started grappling openly with his memories of the war. He confronted them in a series of essays and stories, of which Grave of the Fireflies was among the first. He wrote it in a single six-hour sitting, the words pouring out in long, digressive sentences that pivot around idiosyncratic punctuation:

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Finding motherlike solace in the solid three-foot-square pillars, against each pillar a war orphan was planted, having gathered at the station perhaps because it was the only place they could get into, perhaps from a certain yearning for the ever-present crowds, or that there they had water to drink, or yet from the expectation of some capricious handout; soon into September first it was burnt sugar dissolved in water poured into drum cans …40

The reader is struck first by the precision with which Nosaka evokes his setting. The opening pages sketch the bustling black market of Kobe’s Sannomiya station and the community of orphans gathered around it; one passage is told from their collective perspective. The rest of the novella rushes by in an abundance of detail, some of it only incidental to the main narrative: Nosaka records the minutiae of Seita and Setsuko’s life, but also things like the names of bombed neighbourhoods and the fate of the local Jewish community. His pen seems guided by an anxiety to bear witness to events long repressed. With its unstable syntax and staccato rhythm, his prose casts a febrile mood across the whole story. While the novella is concerned with documenting the facts of this point in history, it remains a work of fiction. We know from Nosaka’s more strictly autobiographical writing that his conduct in these months wasn’t always as virtuous as Seita’s. When his home was bombed, he fled alone, without helping his family as Seita does. And whereas Seita is constantly attentive to Setsuko, Nosaka ate his sister’s food and hit her to stop her crying. In the novella, the widow who houses the children is the only source of hostility towards Setsuko. The survivor’s guilt Nosaka felt was mingled with a sense of culpability for his sister’s death. Fireflies can be seen as his attempt to atone for his actions by acknowledging what he ought to have done; Seita’s own death is the logical outcome of true sacrifice. But if Nosaka hoped to unburden himself by writing the story, he failed. Having idealised his behaviour in the form of Seita, he reproached

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himself for failing to tell the whole truth – something he strained to do in later texts. As he wrote in 1992, ‘My past [writing] has been just a superficial, deceptive act of atonement toward the past.’41 Short and plot-light, Nosaka’s Fireflies is well suited to Takahata’s brand of ‘realism’. His film has the room to develop its characters by lingering on small, relatable moments in their lives. While his screenplay fundamentally retains the novella’s narrative and preserves many scenes almost intact, it also introduces significant changes, most of which serve to flesh out the bond of love between brother and sister. Several references to the wider wartime society are cut, as are a number of tangential flashbacks to the children’s past, and the book’s more gruesome and sexual imagery is toned down. On the other hand, scenes between Seita and Setsuko are expanded, particularly the happy ones. This is their story; theirs are the only names we ever learn. The result is a work of great pathos and poetry. The mood is elegiac, sometimes calm – a far cry from the brittle urgency of Nosaka’s text. These differences reflect the respective target audiences: the novella was published in a literary magazine for adults (All Yomimono), whereas the film is intended for children too. The film’s unique qualities stem from the script and direction as well as the artistry of the creative team, but also from the properties of animation as a medium. This chapter will highlight ways in which Fireflies strives for visual realism. First, however, it is worth setting out some essential differences between animation (however realistic) and live action, and asking: why did Takahata choose animation? We could equally ask: why not? This is where we run into an enduring bias among audiences – an assumption that live action is the default cinematic form, and animation must justify itself whenever it leaves the authorised realms of fantasy and sci-fi. In the narrowest sense, Takahata made Fireflies in animation because he wanted to tell this story, and the experience and talent at his disposal lay overwhelmingly in the animation industry. His choice is as valid as

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Steven Spielberg’s decision to make E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) in live action. Yet this point, while important, says nothing about how Fireflies uses animation to its advantage. To answer that, we can start by looking at logistics. Fireflies is a historical drama with extensive depictions of firebombing and burned-out cities. A liveaction production would require costumes, large sets and elaborate effects. It would take a long shoot to capture the changing seasons. The film’s budget, while sizeable by anime standards of the day, wouldn’t have stretched to high production values. Indeed, two subsequent live-action adaptations of Nosaka’s story – a 2005 TV film and a 2008 theatrical feature – show the strains of compromise: they are mostly shot on small sets and the bombing sequences are awkwardly curtailed. Because we know intuitively what reality looks like, we pick up on the slightest unnaturalness in live action. Paradoxically, the overt artificiality of animation frees us from these distractions. Financial considerations aside, animation minimises what might otherwise have been a fatal difficulty: casting. There are liveaction war films that feature remarkably gritty performances from child actors – Elem Klimov’s Come and See (Idi i smotri, 1985) comes to mind – but they are rare, and the children are almost never as young as four. Even if Takahata’s cast had proved as natural before the camera as they were behind the microphone, they would have been hard-pressed to simulate their characters’ physical decline. Nosaka doubted that any contemporary child could be convincing in these roles: ‘[Seita is] supposed to be a starved boy, but what if a kid with a fat belly showed up on screen to play him?’42 And if their illness were somehow made to look credible, would it be watchable? Would we not recoil at the morbid detail of the makeup, or the knowledge that a five-year-old actor has been put through this? Even in ideal conditions, with unlimited money, a gifted cast and supreme technical resources, a live-action crew could still

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never replicate the achievements of Fireflies. For animation has a tendency to abstract, to idealise, that’s entirely appropriate here. Takahata and his colleagues heighten and simplify visual elements in order to amplify the resonances of their narrative. Animation lets the team conjure up fireflies at will and have them light the scene just so. Or place red phantoms among the living without any sense of contradiction. Or freeze-frame on an emotional beat, or exalt the grace of a tree’s reflection in water. For all their naturalism, the characters are less specific, more iconic, than real people. The aunt is defined by her frowns, Setsuko by the feeling in her enlarged eyes. The disappearance of the catchlight from those eyes notifies us that she’s dying, but in the most aesthetic way. Animation enriches the film’s symbolism and serves the poetic disposition of its story. The film is more accessible, more straightforwardly sentimental, than the novella. But it is no mere tearjerker: this is a Takahata feature, after all, and just below its surface lies a thorny examination of how people interact and take responsibility, which has much to do with the director’s personal vision and the era in which he was working. The tension between its tragedy and social commentary gives the film an unusual charge, which this chapter will try to describe.

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The phantom realm The film starts by introducing one of Takahata’s boldest inventions: a frame narrative in which the two children’s ghosts revisit the scenes of their final months. In the first shot, Seita’s ghost, clad in the uniform of a mobilised wartime labourer and cast in the red glow of the phantom realm, gazes into the camera as he says in voiceover, ‘September 21, 1945. That was the night I died.’ The use of the first person – a departure from the novella43 – strikes an intimate tone. An eyeline match reveals Sannomiya station at night, a subtle fade in the decor indicating a transition from contemporary Japan to 1945. As the red glow gives way to more natural lighting, the real-life Seita appears slumped against a pillar. A close-up pan displays his filthy body, wearing tattered rags which contrast with his ghost’s neat uniform. A cut shifts the scene back a few hours: Seita is in the same position, but the station is crowded. A passer-by, noting the imminent arrival of the Americans, expresses embarrassment at the sight of these ‘tramps’. Cut back to night, and we now see other children, collapsed in their corners. Seita keels over and expires, his last word a feeble ‘Setsuko’. Here is a blunt statement of Takahata’s ‘realism’: children die in wartime, but how many films, let alone animated ones, show this? A station attendant inspecting his body discovers a rusted box, which he casually tosses outside. It opens as it lands, spilling fragments of bone into the grass. The light returns to phantom-red and Setsuko’s ghost, dressed in a protective air-raid hood, appears amid a mass of fireflies. Seita’s smiling ghost comes to her side and hands her the newly pristine box, which turns out to be a tin of Sakuma fruit drops. While the credits play, the pair board an empty train, Michio Mamiya’s lullaby theme accompanying their tranquil ride. Dissonant chords creep in as they turn to the window and witness incendiary bombs falling from the sky in the distance. A white flash consumes the frame,44 cueing a flashback to the morning of 5 June 1945, as B-29 bombers approach Kobe.

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This prologue demonstrates the concision and sophistication of Takahata’s storytelling. Its complex chronology anticipates the film’s use of flashbacks and a final flashforward. We learn that Seita dies shortly after the war’s end (as the American occupiers approach), and that Setsuko’s death precedes his. Like the novella, the film therefore starts from the premise that the children will die, which means that we’ll follow their story in a mood of fatalism, not suspense. The presence of other orphans contextualises their fate, signalling that they are just two tragedies among many.45 Yet these anonymous children are glimpsed only briefly, in a long shot. Gone are Nosaka’s fuller descriptions of the black market and the multitude of orphans. The focus here is on the tenderness between Seita and Setsuko, forever preserved in an afterlife of sweet music and heightened colours. Their ghosts are dressed in the last clothes they wore before their home was bombed – emblems of a more carefree time. But the phantom realm is also a painful place: as we will see, it is the vantage point from which Seita’s ghost looks back at his past traumas. This structure creates a distancing effect, presenting the main narrative as memory; the journey through time is signified by the ghosts’ use of trains. Finally, the realm serves as a portal through which we viewers are implicated in the story. In the very first shot, Seita’s ghost addresses us by looking into the camera and speaking in the first person. The two ghosts are unstuck in time, bridging the decades between the war and our present. The significance of these devices will be elaborated in the last scene. Finally, the prologue introduces two key motifs. The tin of fruit drops, essentially another invention of Takahata’s, will bind Setsuko to Seita throughout the film, representing their capacity to find joy amid darkness while connoting their dwindling supply of food. Then there are the titular fireflies, which cling to the ghosts; their scattered lights are mirrored by the falling bombs.46 These insects, which burn brightly but die quickly, recur throughout Japanese culture as a symbol of life’s evanescence. They are linked in this sequence with

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both the spirits of the dead and the agents of death. They will take on new shades of metaphor as the film unfolds. Trial by fire Prior to 5 June, air-raid sirens sounded regularly in east Kobe, but the area was spared actual bombing. The film’s main narrative opens on the morning when Seita and Setsuko’s neighbourhood of Mikage is finally hit, and their shock is palpable. We meet them in the yard of their well-appointed house, where Seita is hastily burying food supplies. Sending their mother ahead to the shelter (she has a medical condition), Seita grabs items of personal value – a doll for Setsuko, a stern portrait of their navy lieutenant father for himself – and steps into the street just as the incendiaries rain down. He is expected to do his civic duty and fight the flames; the camera lingers on a mop, bucket and water tank, his woefully inadequate tools.47 Instead he flees, Setsuko on his back. They make a frantic dash through the burning city. The ensuing scene is a tour de force of sound design and effects animation: the flames and smoke combine with the drone of the bombers, hiss of the bombs and cries of the crowd to unsettling effect. Takahata worried that postwar generations were forgetting the devastation caused by the firebombs (in contrast to the much-discussed atom bombs), and this scene is staged to impress their awfulness on the viewer. The director draws on his own memories of the air raid, incorporating strange details, like the silence with which incendiaries burn, that imbue his recreation with a dreadful plausibility. In a foreshadowing of later events, Seita goes against the flow of the crowd: as others run from right to left, he stands staring back at the carnage, dumbfounded. Ignoring the busy fire brigade, he escapes alone down quiet backstreets. This scene preserves the richness of Nosaka’s descriptions; credit is due to Nizo¯ Yamamoto’s backgrounds, which precisely reproduce the architecture of a Kobe he (and most viewers) had never known. Yet the cinematic frame can display many details at

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once, relegating some to the background or periphery. This enables the film to remain faithful to the novella’s spirit while striking a tone quite different from its breathless loquacity. Here, there are arresting moments of near-silence. Seita and Setsuko finally rest when they reach the embankment of the Ishiya River. Their personalities are fleshed out in their first proper conversation. In the novella, Setsuko is a somewhat spectral figure: Seita’s pseudo-narration dominates, and his sister’s presence is conveyed only through odd lines of dialogue and brief descriptions of her appearance and actions. The film gives her an independent reality, endowing her – and indeed Seita – with a full range of gestures, expressions and vocal intonations. As required, Yoshifumi Kondo¯ designed the characters to look ‘realistic’. Their proportions are relatively accurate, and remain consistent rather than distorting to reflect emotional states. In the embankment scene, Kondo¯’s achievement is felt in the nuances of their behaviour, which are wonderfully enacted by the animators. As an exhausted Seita offloads Setsuko, she is quivering with fear. Following a cutaway to more scenes of the fires, we see her huddled in his arms, calmed. He looks with concern at passing debris then down at her, and smiles almost imperceptibly. As he reassures her (and himself) that their mother must be safe, worry returns to his face, while Setsuko’s blank gaze reminds us that she is too young to grasp the situation. A couple of low-angle shots show her literal lack of perspective over her environment. What she does understand is her private domestic world, so she takes out her purse – struggling slightly – and asks Seita to open it. Spilling its paltry contents onto the ground, she starts playing with her coins, and giggles as Seita jokes that she is rich. The dialogue is sparse, the character animation restrained, yet the scene manages to establish Setsuko’s innocence, her complete dependence on her brother, and his attentiveness to her in spite of his fear. The pair mount the embankment and survey the scorched remains of their city, chillingly rendered in Yamamoto’s desaturated

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panorama. The only surviving landmark is the civic hall (which still stands today). Seita reminds Setsuko of a lunch they once had there, perhaps to distract her with a happy memory. This line is spoken while the characters are shown from behind – a cost-saving trick that eliminates the need for lip-synch. Asked by Setsuko what they will do, Seita replies, ‘Dad will make them pay for this!’ He has complete faith in his father, who in his mind represents the Japanese forces as a whole. His answer, which smacks of propaganda, is as delusional as it is hostile: Japan’s case is evidently hopeless. Yet this isn’t simply the naive nationalistic outburst of a teenager – adults share his attitude. Minutes before, we saw a firefighter stand proud against the burning city and shout, ‘Long live the Emperor!’ The children walk to the local school, now a makeshift hospital. They are surrounded by survivors but, again, they don’t interact with the crowds. Non-diegetic shots show charred corpses, mangled metal frameworks and other grim tokens of the inferno’s destruction. These images are lifted from the novella, but they also accord with the sights that shocked the young Takahata, which he later described: ‘Thus we walked back to where our home was, looking at all the dead bodies among the ruins of the fires.’48

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At the school, Seita leaves Setsuko in an acquaintance’s care and heads inside to find his mother, barely alive, among the many casualties. Her burned legs and bloody arms are disclosed in closeups before we see her bandaged face. Her mummy-like appearance is a harrowing image, but Takahata actually sanitises Nosaka’s account of the scene. The author mentions the mother’s bared underwear and graphically describes the indignities suffered by others nearby: a woman’s exposed pubic area, the bubbles of blood issuing from a man’s nostrils. Takahata omits these grisly details. Cut to Seita standing in the playground, gazing at Setsuko in the distance against the city’s smoking ruins. This shot is a beautiful instance of Takahata’s tendency, in this film as in others, to deploy a sense of depth in his compositions. (In some shots, he enhances this effect by sliding layers of the scenery laterally at different speeds, creating parallax.) Foreground, middle ground and background are all harnessed for the staging of action in Fireflies. Characters don’t just move across the frame, as is typical in cel animation, but also towards and away from the camera. When they interact, they are often arranged in depth, one placed nearer to the camera than the other. This mise en scène endows the film’s world with dimensionality – that is, with realism.

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Crucially, Takahata’s approach differs from the multiplane effect so famously deployed in Disney’s classic features. In this multiplane set-up, the cels and background are spaced apart; their distance from each other and the camera is adjustable. The resulting image contains a distinct impression of depth – typically, some layers are out of focus – and the film-makers are relatively free to create the illusion of camera movement into the image. In contrast, Takahata has the layers stacked closely together, limiting the scope for zooms but ensuring that every element of the image remains in focus. The characters don’t seem to reside on their own plane. This serves Takahata’s ambition to create a fully realised world in which its inhabitants are firmly anchored.49 The shot of Seita gazing at Setsuko is striking for another reason: it is perfectly still, as is the reverse-angle shot of Seita’s nowfamiliar expression of stifled anxiety. Each shot is held for around five seconds, in silence, as though the shock of the mother’s condition has literally brought time to a standstill. In live action, freeze-frames would be jarring, but here the pauses feel natural, inviting us to dwell on Seita’s internal turmoil. The essence of animation may be the creation of movement out of static images, but with that comes a capacity to deploy stillness for aesthetic effect, which this film exploits marvellously. (Static frames, an extreme case of ‘limited animation’, also save money.) Seita lies to his sister, telling her that their mother is in hospital and will get better. Yet Setsuko, who may have an inkling of what happened, begins to cry, her quiet sniffles the antithesis of the exaggerated bawling we might expect from an anime character; see Mei in Totoro. At a loss, Seita pulls himself up onto a horizontal gym bar and spins around it. ‘Watch me,’ he yells, ‘I’m good at this!’ He wants to console Setsuko, but we suspect that he’s also displacing his unbearable emotions through physical exertion. As he spins, the swell of Mamiya’s plangent score resounds with the grief that he can’t express. An extreme high-angle shot shows the children small and alone in the desolate playground, their shadows long in the

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Mei bawls in My Neighbour Totoro (1988)

dying sunlight. Thus the firebombing sequence ends with one of the most affecting moments in the film. The mother dies the next day. Her bandaged corpse is surrounded by maggots and flies – gross perversions of the firefly motif. She is unceremoniously cremated in a heap of victims and Seita is handed a box containing her remains. (In Japan, bodies are cremated at a relatively low temperature and bone fragments are

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preserved.) The novella elaborates on this scene, mentioning other bereaved locals, but the film moves swiftly on. Seita takes a train to the neighbouring city of Nishinomiya, where Setsuko awaits him at a relative’s house. In the carriage, the camera zooms out to reveal the children’s ghosts sat apart from the commuters, bathed in their red light. Seita’s ghost is looking back at his living self. The meaning of these scenes is starting to emerge. They intervene after distressing incidents – the traumas that continue to haunt Seita in the afterlife. We can view Seita’s ghost as an avatar for the adult Nosaka, who once wrote that he felt as though he had died in 1945 and spent the ensuing decades in a kind of sleepwalk.50 Dissociated from his present reality, he returned time and again to the horrors of the war’s end in his thoughts and writing. But in the film, this painful re-engagement with the past is filtered through the comforting phantom realm. The process has been aestheticised. The composition inside the carriage is worth noting. The camera very rarely zooms out in Fireflies; the only other salient instance comes after the mother’s kimonos are taken from the children, where the technique is also used to reveal Seita’s ghost in the foreground.

Seita’s ghost in the train …

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… and after the kimonos have been taken

In both shots, the camera movement, coupled with the red light and empty middle ground, serves to demarcate the phantom from the living realm. Yet the two realms remain in focus (for the reason described above), and this lends them a certain unity. The ghosts are both of our world and not of it, just as Nosaka is at once trapped in his memories and distanced from them. Pride and patriotism The novella specifies that the children’s relative, a middle-aged woman, is the widow of their father’s younger cousin. In the film, Seita merely describes her as a ‘distant relative’ and the children refer to her as obachan, which can mean either ‘auntie’ or ‘ma’am’. There is no love lost between them: the ‘aunt’ (the translation used in the subtitles) is brusque and hectoring, and shows little compassion for the young refugees. By neglecting to clarify that she’s a widow and tweaking other details, the film diminishes what compassion we might have had for her, and she is cast as something like an antagonist.51 The following chapter broadly alternates between two kinds of scene. In one narrative strand, the children pass the days at the

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house as the aunt, increasingly frustrated by their presence, nags them and chastises Seita for failing to contribute to the war effort (the steelworks where he was mobilised as a labourer have been destroyed). She couches her attacks in the language of patriotism. Whether out of social etiquette, innate awkwardness or emotional paralysis, Seita submits to her unkindness, furrowing his brow and saying little. In contrast, when alone, the children venture outdoors and discover the small pleasures of their new parentless life. Seita, who has so far tried to repress his fear and grief, seems to forget them outright and enjoy himself, and Setsuko follows his lead. These casual moments are either invented or greatly expanded by Takahata. The film’s first categorically happy scene sees Seita return to the site of his destroyed home, where he digs up his supplies. The neighbourhood is rubble but the smoke has cleared, and a camera pan takes in the blue sky as a wistful major-key piano theme plays on the soundtrack. Seita drinks water from a broken pipe, gasping, then eats a pickled plum, his face scrunching up from the sourness. The food and water – these simple life-giving things – provoke physical reactions, jolting him out of the numbness that overcame him after the raid. The rest of the time, he smiles. This scene illustrates the film’s deft colour design, particularly the use of red hues as a motif.52 Yamamoto and Michiyo Yasuda (who handles non-background colours) create a world dominated by two naturalistic tonal ranges: grey-brown and muted green-blue. Reds and pinks stand out vividly, and the film reserves them almost exclusively for things of essential importance or sentimental value: food (plums, tomatoes, watermelon, the tin of fruit drops), objects associated with Setsuko (her shoes, her doll, the tin again) and those associated with the mother (her umbrella, her kimono, cherry blossom, her bloodied bandages). Of course, the phantom realm, where Seita and Setsuko are reunited, is also tinted red. In the scene in the rubble, the colour of the tin and plums comes as a relief after the oppressive browns of the air raid.

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The foodstuffs delight the aunt, who says that ‘soldiers always get the best at times like these’. Her comment betrays class envy: this isn’t the last snide reference she makes to Seita’s father’s prestigious career. Seita then reveals that his mother is dead. The aunt scolds him

Sugimura in Tokyo Story (1953)

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for not having told her sooner and coldly tells him to write to his father (ominously, Seita’s letter will go unanswered). This exchange, which Takahata added, sets the tone for her characterisation, which is developed through subtle details that Nosaka’s prose doesn’t – or can’t – convey. In Akemi Yamaguchi’s memorable performance, the aunt speaks in a persistent whine, and her facial expressions, with their expressive eyebrows, are alternately censorious and haughty. Her appearance was reportedly modelled on Haruko Sugimura, who plays the uncaring eldest daughter in Yasujiro¯ Ozu’s Tokyo Story (To¯kyo¯ monogatari, 1953). We then see Seita and Setsuko in a public bathhouse, playing and laughing like the bathing family in Totoro. They emerge into a balmy evening. This is the first time since the prologue that fireflies appear; Setsuko accidentally squashes one, reminding us of the fragility of these insects (and the lives they symbolise). An establishing shot depicts them free and easy among the paddy fields, not quite alone: the fireflies surround them, in far greater numbers than Nosaka’s text indicates. Seita gives Setsuko a fruit drop and she cavorts about in delight. She almost chokes on it, simply because this is what an excited child would be liable to do. This scene does little to advance the narrative – in the novella, it lasts only one sentence. Rather, it displays Takahata’s ‘realism’ in action: he pays attention to banal, seemingly inconsequential episodes in his characters’ lives, the likes of which are familiar to us all; our empathy for them grows in such moments. Above all, the scene reveals that the children are capable of forgetting the war, at least temporarily, when left to their own devices in nature. Nosaka hints at their carefreeness, noting that ‘the air raids yet seemed to be of another world’s concern’.53 Takahata goes out of his way to show it. He does so again in a subsequent scene at the seaside. At a loose end, Seita and Setsuko decide to go for a swim. A sweet pastoral theme pipes up as they pass lush vegetable gardens on the way. Azure blues and verdant greens dominate, and an idyllic shot of a tram passing through a suburb counterpoints an image of wrecked

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streetcars we saw earlier, after the bombing. On the beach, Setsuko runs into the sea, entranced by its vastness (but not before she has carefully undressed, displaying her good manners). The pair play together. They are so ostentatiously cheerful that they attract stares. Yet even here, their peace is disturbed by reminders of the conflict. On their way to the seaside, they pass a camouflaged training plane, on standby for the final battle for the mainland. At the beach, the rashes on Setsuko’s back portend the malnourishment that will kill her. Moments later, she stumbles on a corpse covered with a straw mat. Seita then experiences a flashback to a seaside trip with their mother some years before, but his reminiscence is ended by an air-raid siren in the present. Fleeing the beach, he and Setsuko witness a mother and daughter tearfully reunite outside the very hospital where Seita told Setsuko that their mother was recovering. This is one of several poignant images of happy families in the film (one fleeting shot even shows a bird delivering food to her chicks). These bleak interruptions in the children’s day trip bring home one of the film’s central messages: joy and beauty are fleeting. It is at the aunt’s house that we become aware of the food shortages. This encroaching crisis crystallises the tension between the

Happy families outside the hospital …

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… and later, outside the bank

aunt and the children. At mealtimes, she serves them small portions on the grounds that they aren’t contributing to the war effort. In a heartbreaking scene, she guilt-trips them into trading their mother’s high-quality kimonos for rice, despite Setsuko’s anguished objections. At this point, as the mother symbolically dies all over again, Seita’s ghost appears in the frame, his hands covering his ears to block out his sister’s wailing. Takahata’s script has the subtlety to complicate the character of the aunt, allowing that she may be good at heart. Once the kimonos have been turned into rice, she and the children eat their first plentiful meal in ages, during which she is pleasant with them. The most charitable reading of this scene is that she is normally kind, and has been made irrational by hunger. The least is that she is selfish, and the children’s sacrifice has merely placated her for a while. In any case, she is hostile again in the next scene. When Seita and Setsuko say they’re receiving less food than the others, she snaps and suggests that they eat separately from now. She pointedly reminds Seita that he has other relatives in Tokyo, not realising that he doesn’t know their address. Here, too, she comes off worse than in the novella, which notes that ‘she had not in fact told [Seita] to leave, but still she

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would not be that unjustified even if she were to tell him clearly once and for all, they had truly overextended their stay’.54 In other words, Nosaka himself empathises with the aunt’s position, but the film doesn’t explicitly convey this sentiment. Conversely, a few scenes later, Takahata gives the aunt’s daughter a new line: ‘Mother, did you scold them again?’ Even she thinks her mother is being unreasonable. As the children retreat from the household and the community, we are left with the strong impression that they have been pushed out. At first, the children experience their retreat as a relief. Seita uses his mother’s savings to buy a stove. They walk home in the pouring rain, belting out the popular children’s song ‘Amefuri’ (Rainfall). Takahata’s Seita is more prone to singing than in the novella, and his sweet tunes, which will be familiar to many Japanese viewers, make him that much more relatable. The pair eat their first meal alone in their room, their smiles expressing delight with the new arrangement. When Setsuko reprimands Seita for not sitting properly, he replies that they needn’t worry about manners – a symptom of his psychological withdrawal from society. At night, Setsuko cries for her mother. Seita takes her outside, soothing her by humming the lullaby ‘Nanatsu no ko’ (Seven Baby Crows). The siren sounds and the scene is plunged in red light.

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The pair, now in their phantom forms, run up the hill and look down at their living selves hiding in a local bomb shelter by a pond. Cut to a closer shot of the (living) children in the shelter. Setsuko complains that she hates living with the aunt. A short flashback shows them merrily singing ‘Koinobori’ (Carp Streamers) – another well-known family song – back at the house, until the aunt furiously cuts them short, calling them ‘pests’ and recommending that they go and live in the shelter. Back in the shelter, Seita resolves to do just that; the aunt’s outburst was the final straw. However, in presenting Seita’s reasons for leaving, the film emphasises a particular nuance. Moments before, as the ghosts crested the hill, we heard his memory of a past rebuke from the aunt: ‘Going to the shelter again, Seita? You’re old enough to help fight the fires, aren’t you?’ The aunt isn’t merely hostile – she is a constant reminder of his failure to the community, and he can’t bear this. He tells Setsuko that they will move into the shelter and ‘live like we want’. They pack their bags and bid farewell to the aunt, who looks surprised – did she mean what she said? – yet hardly protests. As they go, Setsuko giggles wildly, prompting the aunt to double-take. How can these children, who have just lost their mother and home, feel happy at all? Too young to understand her predicament, Setsuko seeks guidance from her brother, who is good at comforting and distracting her. For his part, Seita is somewhat in denial. He hasn’t yet grieved his mother’s death. There are many indications that Japan is heading for defeat – the rationing, the bombings, his father’s silence, dire warnings from the aunt’s lodger – yet Seita is oblivious. He is still cocooned in propaganda (at one point, we see him reading a jingoistic women’s magazine), and he takes heart from the conviction that his father is alive. And as Nishinomiya has not yet been bombed, its relative tranquillity reassures the children. Most importantly, Seita finds solace in caring for Setsuko. He loves her dearly, but his affection is intertwined with another dynamic. He is on the cusp of adulthood, and there are signs that he’s grappling with a specific concept of masculinity imposed by

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his society. When at his most insecure, he often resorts to mindless gestures of virile strength: swinging on the playground bar, asserting that his father will make the Americans pay. Later, he will play-act the gunning down of enemy planes. Seita idolises his father. In a telling flashback following the aunt’s confiscation of the kimonos, Seita, Setsuko and their parents assemble in happier times for a family photo. Seita’s school uniform resembles his father’s navy outfit. While Setsuko clings to her mother, Seita emulates his father’s stiff pose and austere expression – the ideal of the disciplined male imperial subject. The father is both the family’s breadwinner and Japan’s protector, and Seita fantasises about assuming this dual role himself. But he is too young to join the army, too frightened even to fulfil his duty as a firefighter.55 He seems ill-suited to the military, and may well know this and feel ashamed. So he compensates by acting as a father figure to Setsuko, providing her with food and his idea of safety. His care is an act of love, but also a matter of pride. When the aunt accuses him of doing nothing for his country, he is hurt. The complications of masculinity are more overt in the novella. As Seita washes Setsuko’s body at the beach, he notes that her thighs are ‘already taking a plump rounded girlish shape’.56 In the cave,

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hugging her, ‘he squeezed her naked feet into his abdomen, suddenly Seita felt an aching sense of excitement’.57 Later, as she lies dying, he imagines ‘cutting my finger, letting her drink the blood … I could give her the meat of it’.58 These startling images mingle actual hunger with sexual appetite. Incest is a recurring theme in Nosaka’s writing, but here he isn’t insinuating that Seita has committed any sexual acts – rather, that the boy is troubled, on top of everything else, by a burgeoning libido that has no outlet. The author commented on this in an interview: But objectively speaking, Setsuko is four years old, the age when a girl looks the cutest. And a fourteen- to fifteen-year-old boy is at the age when he’s becoming aware of his masculinity, ergo his ego. That kind of pair heads into a life that includes only the two of them. There’s an obvious consanguineous relationship there … he’s shut out from being able to love her as a girl. His tension grows high – hence a sublimation takes place.59

In real life, Nosaka was infatuated with the daughter of the widow he moved in with, to the point where he was sometimes distracted from looking after his sister. He omits this from the novella – in fact, he projects his desire onto the lodger, who has ‘eyes for the daughter’.60 Thus Seita remains devoted to his sister even as he experiences the pangs of adolescence. The film goes further, implying that it is the daughter who is attracted to Seita: over dinner, she glances at him and blushes. Otherwise, Takahata downplays the sexual overtones, opting to present Seita’s struggles with his masculinity in a more innocent light. A unique kind of energy When measuring the ambitions and achievements of Fireflies, critics often draw comparisons to live-action cinema. Italian neorealism is the most typical reference point. Takahata admired the neorealists, and his film has much in common with theirs. Like them, he takes the war-torn city as his setting and the hardships of normal people as

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his subject. He too opts for straightforward plots, avoids spectacle, uses non-professional actors and takes an interest in the rich detail of quotidian life. We can certainly apply Roberto Rossellini’s definition of the movement to Fireflies: Neorealism consists of following someone with love and watching all his discoveries and impressions; an ordinary man dominated by something which suddenly strikes him a terrible blow at the precise moment when he finds himself free in the world.61

However, Takahata and Nosaka preferred a rather different analogy – one that speaks of the romantic impulse in Fireflies. They agreed that the story is indebted to the ‘double suicide tale’ (shinju¯mono), a genre that flourished in the Japanese puppet theatre in the late seventeenth century.62 These plays, whose greatest exponent was Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725), centre on starcrossed lovers whose romance is forbidden by social circumstances, such as class difference or prior marital arrangements. Overwhelmed by the conflict between their love and their responsibilities to society, they settle on the only way out of the deadlock: death. The central literary device of the double suicide tale is the ‘lovers’ journey’ (michiyuki). The couple leave their homes to die together. Temporarily liberated, they experience an almost euphoric surge of emotion, whose intensity is heightened by their imminent demise. As they walk, they pass natural imagery that poetically mirrors the frailty of their existence: melting frost, flowing waters, lightning flashes and the like. Chikamatsu elevated the lovers’ journey to sublime heights of lyricism.63 Again, the parallels with Fireflies are apparent. While Seita and Setsuko are not lovers, they do love one another, and their desire to live in splendid isolation has a romantic undercurrent (as Nosaka suggests above). This desire clashes with Seita’s official duties to the community. Fireflies mimics the structure of a double suicide tale: the protagonists’ deaths are a foregone conclusion, so what

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we see of their lives is charged with pathos. The analogy has a final significance to do with the notion of ‘suicide’, which will be described below.64 The children’s days in the shelter are akin to their lovers’ journey. This chapter, which Takahata described as the ‘heart’ of the story,65 takes up a much greater portion of the film than the novella. It opens with a montage that shows Seita and Setsuko buying straw, fetching water and cooking by the pond. The mood at this point in the novella is subdued: ‘[the shelter] was not much more than a hole in the ground, depressing to think of having to live there’.66 But in the film they’re ecstatic: Setsuko dashes around excitably, designating which part of the shelter will be the entrance, which the kitchen. Never do they more resemble the sisters in Totoro, who, in different circumstances, are also left largely unsupervised and free to project their imaginations onto their environment. During production, Takahata vowed that Fireflies would portray the ‘unique kind of energy that bursts from children’, and that this would save it from being a ‘sad’ film.67 In the early scenes at the shelter, we witness the final blaze of that energy. Just as fireflies glow at night, the passions of childhood stand out against the darkness of war. More directly than in the novella, Nosaka expressed this sentiment in an interview: [W]e could all see so well back then. After all, we were about to die, so it was the terminal vision of people about to die. Everything looked so fresh … Death was nearby, so the feeling of life was overwhelming.68

The countryside figures prominently in Takahata’s oeuvre as a site of sustenance and self-realisation. The features he made before and after Fireflies, The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals (Yanagawa horiwari monogatari, 1987) and Only Yesterday,69 focus on city dwellers who find fulfilment in returning to ancestral practices of land management. Nature is not the subject of Fireflies, but its presence is gently affirmed throughout the film in the form of incidental cutaways to landscapes and wildlife.70 It comes to the fore in the pond scenes. Whatever the

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wisdom of the children’s move to the shelter, the film sees a beauty in their Edenic setting and a certain nobility in their determination to live off the land. There is an undercurrent of nostalgia here: by the time the film was made, nature had retreated from many Japanese people’s lives. In particular, the firefly population had been decimated by agrochemicals and habitat loss, to the extent that conservationists began launching ‘firefly revival movements’ in the 1960s. These great symbols of impermanence were themselves vanishing. Night falls on the children’s first day alone and Setsuko says she forgot her toothbrush. ‘One night without it won’t matter,’ replies Seita, with no forethought; he’s now living in the moment. An illuminated kamikaze plane flies overhead on its fatal mission and Setsuko innocently observes that it looks like a firefly, underlining the insects’ association with doomed lives. Her remark inspires Seita to catch dozens of fireflies and release them inside their mosquito net. The children’s faces, tightly framed in close-ups, look on mesmerised as the insects turn the pitch-black shelter yellow-green. This exquisite moment is all the more touching for being entirely fictional. According to Nosaka, the firefly season in Nishinomiya had passed by the time he and his sister moved to the shelter. In any case, the scenes in which Seita and Setsuko bond like this are all fantasies, for in reality Nosaka’s sister was not even two when she died, and never really learned to speak or play. As ever, the beauty can’t last. As Seita gazes at the twinkling fireflies, they morph into the lights of a naval review he attended in 1935. The shelter gives way to his memory of the parade: a display of patriotism in full pomp, with Seita’s father at the heart of proceedings.71 The cheering crowds leave no doubt that support for militarism was widespread among the Japanese people, not just developed as a defensive reaction to American bombs. Back in the shelter, Seita starts harshly chanting the navy’s anthem. He mimes the waving of a flag and the gunning down of an enemy plane. A reverse cut reveals that he’s pointing his imaginary weapon at the glittering emptiness of the shelter – a metaphor for the hollowness of jingoism.

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Snapping out of his reverie, Seita mutters, ‘I wonder where Dad is fighting now.’ He doesn’t suspect what we do: that his father, along with the rest of the navy – which has been linked to fireflies – is on the ocean floor. In a pang of loneliness, he cuddles the sleeping Setsuko. A more sentimental director would end the scene here, capping this evening of shared bliss with a sweet embrace. But Setsuko, annoyed at having been woken, wriggles free, as an uncomfortable child would. This detail speaks a painful truth: there is a limit to the comfort individuals can give each other. A fleeting cutaway to a firefly expiring concludes the scene. We never see the children happy together again. The next morning, Seita finds Setsuko digging a mass grave for the fireflies outside. She says, ‘Mama’s in a grave too. Auntie told me.’ Hearing this, Seita weeps for the first time, biting his lips and bowing his head. Close-ups of faces are risky in animation – lacking the infinite micro-expressions of a real actor, they can end up stilted – but Seita’s ‘acting’ here is masterfully subtle. There follows an unmotivated cut to an overhead long shot of the children; perhaps, for a second, we have adopted the protective gaze of their mother’s spirit. Why does Seita cry now? Is he sad that Setsuko knows? Angry with the aunt for telling her? Ashamed at having deceived her –

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The young children enact their own burials in Forbidden Games (1952)

and himself? It is a powerfully ambiguous moment, but what’s clear is that Setsuko’s gesture permits him to start grieving. None of the dead in the story – Seita, the mother, those cremated with her, the father, the body on the beach – receive proper funeral rites. (Setsuko does, but her remains are disturbed again when the station attendant discards them.) Society is in a state of arrested mourning, unable to process all the casualties. Anyway, the logic of patriotism discourages people from dwelling on setbacks; the adult characters seem almost disengaged from the suffering that surrounds them. It takes the naive Setsuko to acknowledge death, and try to understand it, by holding

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a funeral. Her actions recall the traumatised girl’s obsessive burial of animals in René Clément’s Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits, 1952), another war film in the neorealist vein.72 When Seita reassures Setsuko that they’ll visit their mother’s grave (another white lie, as there is no grave), she looks up and tearfully asks, ‘Why do fireflies have to die so soon?’ Of course, her question extends to the innocent victims of war, including herself. Seita has no answer. Cut to a shot from within the shelter, which shows the children framed by the entrance as two fireflies appear against them in the foreground. The camera follows the insects as they drift through the space, which is lit with the phantom-red glow emanating from the box that contains the mother’s remains. We hear a variation on Mamiya’s death theme, which played during the mother’s cremation and will be reprised for Setsuko’s. Takahata seems to be reminding us that these children have, in a sense, already died. In its shape, their shelter even resembles the tumuli (kofun) in which distinguished persons were buried in prehistoric Japan. In the film it is referred to as a yokoana, which literally means ‘cave’, but also denotes one type of such burial chambers. These impressions are reinforced in the following scene, when local boys stumble on the shelter and sneer at its meagre provisions. One goes inside only to run back out, shouting, ‘A ghost!’ The entrance to a yokoana burial chamber

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The downward spiral If the narrative’s first third was dominated by tension and emotional repression, and the middle chapter centred on moments of rapturous joy, then desperation is the prevailing mood from here on. The children lost access to rations when they abandoned the administrative network of the community, and inflation has rendered their remaining money worthless. A scene in which Seita fails to sell low-quality kimonos he stole implies what the novella makes clear: he doesn’t understand the black market. While Setsuko starves, Seita goes half-mad caring for her, resorting to reckless measures to find food. Kondo¯’s designs are distressingly effective here. The children become dirtier, their clothes more ragged. Setsuko, increasingly emaciated, comes to resemble the limp doll she has clutched all film long. As she approaches death, the catchlight disappears from her eyes, signifying lifelessness. The sight of them suffering is more emotive than Nosaka’s terse descriptions – more so, arguably, than prose can ever be. The misery of these scenes is only alleviated by the pair’s love for one another, which seems to grow stronger as they grow weaker. Seita is single-mindedly devoted to Setsuko. Once again, he has been idealised. Nosaka admitted to hitting his sister when she cried – even

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concussing her – and sometimes eating her share of food. ‘I loved her,’ he wrote in an essay, ‘but my gluttony overrode my affection and concern for her.’73 Although Seita is a model of patience, Nosaka still includes a reference to the frustration he remembers feeling: as Seita consoles his bawling sister, he thinks, ‘it would all be so much easier if only Setsuko weren’t here’.74 Even this suggestion is absent from the film, which depicts their love as pure and uncompromised. Shortly before Setsuko dies, Takahata gives them dialogue plucked from the conventions of romantic tragedy: cradled in Seita’s arms, she says, ‘Don’t go! Stay with me! Don’t leave me alone!’, to which he replies, ‘I’ll never leave you again.’ As Seita and Setsuko draw closer together, they grow ever more alienated from society, which is itself straining under the pressures of war. Thoughts are turning to self-preservation. The children ask to buy rice from the kindly farmer who sold them straw, but he says – while eating – that he has none to spare. He tells Seita to ‘swallow your pride’ and return to the aunt’s house, but Seita ignores him. Another farmer catches Seita stealing vegetables. The farmer roughs him up and hauls him to the police station, but the officer protects Seita by threatening to arrest the farmer for assault. This is no normal social interaction: the parties have been reduced to

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intimidating each other with the draconian laws of wartime Japan. The wretched encounter ironically plays out in front of the national flag and a poster bearing the characters 八紘一宇 (hakko¯ ichiu), an imperial slogan denoting harmony under Japanese dominion. A bruised Seita leaves the station to find Setsuko, who followed him there. She asks, ‘Where does it hurt?’, and he turns his head in shame and cries, realising that he has failed: she is now the one caring for him. In its shape and emotional effect, this sequence resembles the father’s botched attempt to steal a bicycle as his young son watches on in Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948), a canonical neorealist work which Takahata knew well. In both cases, the protagonist is at his most pathetic when trying to be heroic. The firebombs reach Nishinomiya, and Seita starts entering the city during raids to loot from vacated homes. These frantic scenes, made more unsettling by the fast editing, mirror the raid on Kobe; the sight of Seita running against the crowd reverses the earlier shot in which he stood dumbfounded while others fled. Escaping with a bounty of goods, he jumps, whoops and cackles to himself, his eyebrows fixed in a mad scowl. The euphoria he felt in the early days at the shelter has given way to delirium. But his last-ditch strategy is too little, too late. Setsuko continues to waste away, her listlessness contrasting with Seita’s agitation. At a clinic, a doctor gives her a cursory inspection and declares that she just needs food. Seita pleads angrily for help, to no avail. Outside, he asks Setsuko what she would most like to eat and she lists various treats, concluding with fruit drops. In the novella, this exchange is bracketed by flashbacks in which Seita reminisces about the rich foods he grew up eating (or brattishly refused to eat). He then recalls a time when he shared his apple ‘with the poor kid who had nothing but lemon drops’.75 Later, after cremating Setsuko, Seita has another flashback: he once walked with his mother through that very area, on their way to ascertain the aunt’s ‘background’ before her marriage into the father’s family. These flashbacks serve

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Seita hesitates during the first raid but runs purposefully in the later ones

as bitterly ironic reminders that Seita’s family had wealth and status – certainly more than the aunt. They help explain why Seita refused to submit to her authority, and why she resented him so: he has a streak of class pride. Takahata downplays this dynamic by cutting the flashbacks (although a version of the first, which shows a young Seita and Setsuko receiving tasty snacks, was storyboarded). Once again, Seita comes across a little more sympathetically in the film.

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A storyboarded flashback showing Seita and Setsuko eating snacks was cut from the film

As a typhoon approaches, the sense of despair thickens. At the bank, Seita learns that Japan has surrendered and its navy is ruined. His first reaction is disbelief: ‘Japan’s lost? The Great Japanese Empire?’ Then he lashes out, collaring a customer and begging for news of his father. The man shoves him to the floor – ‘Crazy kid’ – and Seita runs out, cursing his father as he clutches his wrinkled photo with shaking hands. Defeat leads not to solidarity, but to more discord and bewilderment. Seita has only ever known Japan as an imperial power: in one go, he has lost another parent and his whole system of reality. The novella pinpoints this as the instant when he loses the will to live.

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Seita returns to the shelter to find Setsuko at death’s door. She is lying straight on her back as though ready for her funeral rites, hallucinating fireflies and sucking on a marble. Choking back tears, he cuts her a slice of watermelon (Takahata later regretted the knife’s unrealistic movement through the fruit). Setsuko feebly chews it and says, ‘Seita, thank you.’ Takahata wisely refrains from using music in this scene, giving space to Ayano Shiraishi’s and Tsutomu Tatsumi’s tender performances. Setsuko’s expression of gratitude, which also appears in Nosaka’s text, provides a measure of closure: Seita’s actions are justified to the extent that they’ve brought his sister some comfort in her last hours. If the novella enabled Nosaka to start working through his guilt, Setsuko’s words mark a tentative attempt to forgive himself. Takahata respectfully preserves them. In fact, he upgrades their significance by displacing them slightly to make them her last words. Seita’s voiceover informs us that Setsuko died soon after. His anguish is captured in a startling expressionistic composition: a monochrome still of him holding her body tightly as the storm rages outside. His face is blank. At this point, Takahata inserts a scene of his invention. Young female evacuees return to their opulent home across the pond. Giddy with relief, they put on the record ‘Home Sweet Home’, a nostalgic English song that was popular in Japan during the war – the demoralised soldiers in Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp find solace in singing it together. As the music plays, the camera pans over to the shelter, where Setsuko’s figure fades into view. The echoing of her voice implies that we are seeing Seita’s memories. We see her amuse herself around the shelter in a series of vignettes. In a subversion of the imagery of militaristic propaganda, she wears her washing bowl like a helmet and salutes, only for the bowl to slide uselessly off her head. She laughs and plays house, lost in the selfsufficient pleasure of childhood. The song’s lyrics affirm that she and Seita succeeded, for a while, in recreating the domestic bliss they’d lost: ‘Be it ever so humble / There’s no place like home.’

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This is the film’s only substantial scene in which Setsuko appears alone. As scholars have noted, Nosaka’s novella serves as a memorial to his sister, a substitute for the grave denied her. He couldn’t save her life, but his writing rescued it from oblivion. Takahata grasped this aspect of Nosaka’s work and expanded it by lingering on the bright spots in Setsuko’s last months. The film becomes his own tribute to the girl, culminating in this serene final flashback.

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The main narrative ends with Seita’s cremation of Setsuko atop a nearby hill. Mamiya’s death theme returns as Seita places his sister’s possessions alongside her corpse in a basket, his expression still vacant. He sets the basket alight and lies beside it as day turns to night and fireflies emerge. Nosaka mentions that Seita, already ill, defecates next to the flames, but in the film the scene is left unspoiled, the sunset hues of Yamamoto’s artwork suffusing the landscape with an elegiac calm. As Seita sits numbly eating next to the embers, his voiceover tells us that he put Setsuko’s remains in the tin of fruit drops and never returned to the shelter. The remaining month of his now-meaningless life is not shown. The preceding analysis has commented on both the ‘realism’ and the romantic sensibility of Fireflies. This may seem like a contradiction, but one of the film’s most remarkable accomplishments is the way it reconciles the two tendencies. It conjures up a fully realised world and populates it with characters who move, talk and act like actual people, not the archetypes we might expect in an animated feature for families. We can thus empathise with Seita and Setsuko, imagining ourselves in their predicament, which might otherwise seem utterly alien. At the same time, Takahata smooths the rough edges of Nosaka’s account and adds dramatic and poetic flourishes that bring out the pathos of the children’s story, helping us to sympathise with them. As a result, the film ends up more classically tragic than the novella (and also more accessible to young viewers), without slipping into full-blown melodrama. It is so unusually moving because it gets the balance between realism and romanticism just right. Fireflies goes to exceptional lengths to make us notice the details of human behaviour. This saves the film from didacticism: Takahata is too interested in showing us how we are, in all our complexity, to lecture us. Yet he does have an overarching message, which his film imparts subtly – maybe too subtly. A clue to understanding it lies in the very last scene.

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As Seita sits by the embers, Setsuko’s voice calls to him, triggering a segue into the phantom world. Cut to a shot of her running towards him and, in a reverse shot, sitting next to him on a bench, smiling. He hands her the fruit drops and says, ‘Time for bed, OK?’ She nods and lays her head on his lap, whereupon he looks soberly into the camera (as he did at the film’s beginning) before directing his gaze off-screen. A crane shot discloses what he’s looking at: a glittering contemporary metropolis spreading out beneath the

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hill. From the children’s peaceful pose, we could infer that Seita’s ghost has found a measure of closure by contemplating the events of his last months. We could equally observe that he has returned to the modern day (where we found him in the opening shot), and take this circular structure to mean that he is doomed to repeat the process. After all, Nosaka himself never really ceased to revisit these traumas. In any case, Takahata conceived this startling final image with another, more elusive significance in mind. This forms the subject of the rest of the chapter. A strange failure A grieving Setsuko looks into the camera and utters the film’s defining line: ‘Why do fireflies have to die so soon?’ These words have become iconic because they capture, via the film’s central metaphor, its essential question: why did these children die so young? The question has a philosophical dimension – why is there such suffering in the world? – but Fireflies doesn’t explore it in these terms (not like, say, The Burmese Harp, with its introspective soldier-turned-monk). Setsuko’s line aside, the characters never ponder the meaning of what they’re going through. Takahata’s eye is on how they interact and make decisions on an everyday basis. He is interested in the subject of accountability, which is never explicitly broached but haunts every stage of the story. Who, specifically, is responsible for the deaths of these two children? The answer depends on the viewer. For some it’s the Americans, the agents of the devastation; the American critic Roger Ebert, for one, was led to question whether firebombing is ethical. For others it’s the Japanese regime, which started the war. Others yet blame both at once. The film allows for all these readings. The cruelty of the US’s indiscriminate firebombing is made plain. On the other hand, there are frequent allusions to the folly of Japan’s imperial project. Fireflies doesn’t seek to glamorise the conflict, nor to compare the morality of the two sides. It is not about how war is fought or justified, but rather how civilians respond to it.

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Among the civilians, too, there are several candidates for blame. At this level, viewers tend to hold the aunt most responsible for the children’s deaths. No wonder, given how she’s characterised: two orphans are placed in her custody, yet she sees their relationship as purely transactional, expecting them to surrender their valuables and step up their patriotism in return for bed and board. When they object, she spites them. While the novella gives context to her behaviour, the film mostly cuts it, bolstering the impression that she’s just mean. She couldn’t be more of a contrast to the virtuous mother she has effectively replaced, and it’s easy to conclude that she has failed in her duty of care. Yet Takahata cautioned against this interpretation. The film’s production notes explicitly state that the aunt is ‘not a bad person’.76 The director accepted that she might seem harsh, but added: ‘However, as people who lived through those times know, such unpleasantness wasn’t unusual and didn’t necessarily qualify as nasty “bullying”. That aunt was selfish, but then so were most people.’77 War is a mitigating circumstance. The notion of the aunt as a victim in her own right is developed in the two live-action adaptations of Nosaka’s text. The 2008 feature sticks closely to the novella, but adds a touching scene in which the aunt grieves for her husband who died at the front. The 2005 TV film goes further, rewriting the story from her viewpoint and adding a substantial backstory that draws us into her family life. Her portrayal here, by Ring (Ringu, 1998) star Nanako Matsushima, is very different: she is gentle, beautiful and burdened with four children of her own to feed. Only the pressures and indignities of war make her act coldly towards Seita and Setsuko, and when she learns of their deaths she is overcome with remorse. Takahata’s version of the aunt is the least sympathetic of all, yet even she can be amiable, as when the children sell their kimonos. Takahata’s reasoning is borne out by the conduct of the other adults in the story. Their treatment of the children ranges from gentle (the policeman) to ruthless (the farmer who thrashes Seita), but none

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are truly compassionate – if they were, they would take a more active interest in the children’s situation. Many viewers blame them, too. Yet the film takes care to give them diverse personalities (through their actions, but also their appearances and voices), to underline that the only thing they share is the experience of war. They are desperate to survive and inured to the suffering of others, and this, rather than some inherent malice, is why they don’t do more to help. The novella makes this point more forcefully by doing more to evoke the sheer number of orphans, reminding us that the adults’ indifference to Seita is nothing personal. Society may be unravelling, but what remains of its structures can still provide assistance. The film makes this clear. The (kinder) farmer gives Seita a crucial piece of advice: ‘Go back to that woman. Everything’s rationed now. You can’t survive outside of the system.’ Seita ignores him, presenting us with a dreadful counterfactual. Had he and Setsuko returned, or never left in the first place, would they have lived? Takahata made it clear that he held Seita partly responsible for his fate. If the aunt’s unkindness is normal in wartime, he argued, then Seita is all the more mistaken in refusing to put up with it for his and Setsuko’s sake. His comfortable upbringing has not prepared him for the compromises required by war, and his decision to live independently betrays his weaknesses: his pride, his lack of foresight, his stubborn insistence on doing as he pleases. It amounts to a kind of unwitting suicide; thus the analogy with the double suicide tale is completed. Not only that, Takahata saw in Seita the vices of his own society. His production notes confirm that he conceived the film as an allegory of a very modern malaise: Seita’s actions and emotional reactions have something in common with the children and young people of today, who are materially well off; baulk at interpersonal relations, with all their complications; and to a large extent determine their interactions with others, their behaviour, their sense of

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identity according to what they find pleasant and what they do not. In fact, that goes too for the adults to whom this era also belongs … Never, in the forty years since the war’s end, has the way Seita lives and dies seemed so relatable, so reflective of our own problems.78

Herein lies the intended meaning of that final shot, and of Seita’s looks into the camera: the film is casting a critical gaze on contemporary society. With hindsight, Seita’s ghost has understood what went wrong in the summer of 1945, and his insights hold an important lesson for the audience. To understand how Takahata could compare the war to the prosperous 1980s, we need to consider his political views. As he saw it, the industrial and economic transformations on which postwar Japan’s wealth was built had caused great damage. He bemoaned a nation that had atomised, under the pressures of urbanisation and rampant profit-seeking, into alienated individuals. Rural communities had dispersed and family ties had slackened. The citizens of this world, particularly the youths, had turned into pampered consumers with no sense of civic responsibility. They were retreating into the private comfort of video games and Walkmen – their own metaphorical shelters – convinced that they could do without society. The director may have been alluding to a phenomenon that was emerging in Japan in the 1980s: the extreme recluses who would come to be identified by terms like hikikomori. Takahata was vocal about the changes he wanted to see. He advocated a return to a more communitarian society in which power was devolved to local governments, the excesses of capitalism were curbed, and citizens learned to live in harmony with each other and nature.79 This ideal forms a subtext in his works: time and again, they focus on individuals who derive satisfaction and a sense of identity from joining or affirming their place within a community, be it the family unit in My Neighbours the Yamadas, the rural village in The Little Norse Prince, the pack of raccoon dogs in Pom Poko (Heisei tanuki gassen ponpoko, 1994) or the entire earthly population in

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The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. In each case, much of the drama (and comedy) comes from the group’s efforts to negotiate their differences. Fireflies gives the negative example, showing what can happen when people fail to collaborate. It portrays a society turning against itself: in the struggle for survival, people are becoming selfish. Their attitude exposes the fraternal rhetoric of patriotism as a lie. Far from uniting them, patriotic language is in fact associated with discord and destruction: the aunt weaponises it; Seita spouts it when vulnerable; imperial slogans are evoked during disputes in the bank and police station; a solitary firefighter hails the emperor as Kobe burns. Seita ultimately rejects this society by escaping it, but in doing so he outstrips everyone in his self-centredness. He is a teenager who was raised in affluence and ends up in a cave. He is our protagonist. Takahata hoped that viewers would relate to him – and his flaws – above any other character. By assessing contemporary Japan in this way, Takahata was also questioning some of its dominant historical narratives. Firstly, Fireflies debunks the assumption that the Japanese people were passively dragged into the war: the characters don’t seem hesitant in their nationalism, and the film reminds us that war is fuelled by popular support. A related notion that has gained currency in Japan is that the war was a necessary condition for the country’s subsequent prosperity: rid of their wartime leaders, the people were able to redirect their energies towards economic growth, and their success redeemed the country.80 Takahata found this viewpoint dangerous. If anything, economic growth was exposing inherent weaknesses in the social fabric. The population had acted less than honourably in the war and their nature had changed little in the decades since. Until they fully reckoned with this fact, lasting peace and prosperity could not be guaranteed. Takahata believed the Japanese to be particularly inadequate in this regard.81 At least countries like the US, he argued, had deeprooted traditions of democracy and individualism that emboldened

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people to challenge received wisdom and speak truth to power. He feared that his fellow citizens, schooled in the value of groupthink, lacked the character to own up to their collective wartime responsibility as civilians. They would remain unreflective, and if their government ever proposed war again, they wouldn’t think to resist. Nosaka too had concerns about Japan’s postwar trajectory. The late 1960s, which is when he wrote his novella, seemed to him an ‘abnormal time’.82 He felt estranged from a country that had so fervently embraced material wealth, as though it were a cure-all for the scars of war. The fact that Japan was then profiting from the Vietnam War through military contracts with the US (as it previously had from the Korean War) underlined its hypocrisy. As the author wrote in 1968, ‘Complacently living as we do in peace and prosperity, we naturally think that Vietnam has nothing to do with us. But one misstep, war breaks out.’83 Takahata’s film sets out to critique both civilian conduct in war and the priorities of contemporary Japan. A principle of the director’s ‘realism’ was that the audience should be induced to reflect on their own habits and decisions. Here, then, are some questions viewers might ask themselves: how had they – or their parents or grandparents – behaved in the war? How did they feel about that? Would they ever support another war? Would they rally together if one came? What had improved with prosperity and what had been lost? In the simplest terms: the next time they saw their neighbour, would they say hi? Any viewer – certainly anyone living in the developed world – could ask themselves such questions. Yet Takahata’s commentary is grounded in specificities of Japanese culture and history. There is a good reason for this: he was addressing his film to Japan. International distribution was not a significant part of Ghibli’s business model in the 1980s; in any case, Takahata insisted that he made his films for the domestic market and viewed any success abroad as a bonus. His condemnation of Seita and the other characters wasn’t meant as an apologia for the US, a country whose

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warmongering he deplored. He was simply addressing the issues he thought most relevant to his audience. And he didn’t exempt himself from his reproach – he worried that he too might have gone along with the war, had he been older at the time. Fireflies was intended first and foremost as a study of how people interact, specifically in a crisis. Takahata refused to call it an ‘anti-war film’ on the grounds that he didn’t think it could contribute to world peace. In his view, a film worthy of the label would have to examine the particular causes of past wars in depth; scenes of suffering alone wouldn’t deter audiences from supporting future conflicts, as these scenes might strike them as remote, irrelevant – after all, no country enters a war expecting to lose. But to the director’s dismay, ‘an overwhelming majority’ of viewers saw things differently: Across the country, schoolchildren had simple yet honest reactions: ‘war is scary, I feel sorry for the two children, their deaths really marked me, war is cruel, we must avoid it at all costs’ … A great many people cried, adults and children alike. So they took it as an ‘anti-war film’. This made me reflect, and I realised that their interpretation was only natural.84

This fact still bothered him in 2015, when he wrote: ‘After Grave of the Fireflies was completed, it was categorised as an “anti-war film”. However, this didn’t feel right to me, and I insisted that it wasn’t an “anti-war film”.’85 It turned out that Japanese viewers didn’t share Takahata’s rigorous definition of an ‘anti-war film’. What’s more, he found that his core message didn’t resonate as widely as he’d expected. Most people only felt sorry for Seita. Takahata wondered whether they were deliberately ignoring the story’s relevance to their lives because acknowledging it would be unpleasant – proof of the very weakness he’d identified in them. In his later years, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the Japanese public, accusing them of letting their emotions get the better of their judgment (see the next chapter).

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We can question the validity of these claims. A society of more than 120 million people resists sweeping generalisations; Takahata’s arguments sometimes resemble a negative image of the cultural determinism of nihonjinron, the ‘discourse of Japanese uniqueness’ which has undergirded much nationalist thought in the postwar era. Anyway, whatever the viewers’ inclinations, I believe ambiguities in Fireflies itself have widened the gap between Takahata’s intended meaning and the most common interpretations of the film. Firstly, there is Seita’s portrayal. Fireflies doesn’t function only as social commentary but also as a portrait of the simple love and joy that these two children experience. Inevitably, their story is a touching one. In creating Seita, Nosaka expressly purged the character of many of his own inadequacies, and the film idealises him further. The result is a boy who smiles, sings and devotes himself to his sister. More than in the novella, we inhabit his world and feel his every emotion. Meanwhile, whatever Takahata might say, his versions of the adult characters are that bit less sympathetic. However inadvertently, the film encourages us to root for Seita and mistrust the others. Also significant is Seita’s age. He is caught between childhood and adulthood, an indeterminate state described by Nosaka: ‘I was a naive one myself until the age of fourteen … and I had to grow up quickly after being placed in such a situation.’86 Our opinion of Seita depends on our personal understanding of when maturity begins. While Takahata held him responsible for his actions, we may disagree: the onus is not on Seita to tolerate the aunt, but on her to protect these vulnerable young refugees. There are viewers who forgive all the characters, excusing them for being misled by propaganda or arguing that people in danger have the right to put themselves first; some of these viewers may be trying, consciously or not, to justify how their own families behaved in the war. Some viewers do find fault with Seita, to varying degrees. Which is where another ambiguity comes in: the film doesn’t clearly articulate the parallels between his life and contemporary society. Only in the final shot of the city does the present clearly intrude into

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the narrative, but the meaning of this image is ambiguous. Maybe we are being instructed to remember the sacrifices of the wartime generation, or even comforted with the notion that the dead keep benevolent watch over us. Those who know little of Japan’s recent history will lack the context needed to parse Takahata’s allegory. Some will see the allegory but disagree with it – they may consider war to be an exceptional situation, too extreme to be compared to anything, let alone their own times. When I first saw the film aged fourteen, I pardoned Seita for everything, as I didn’t think it was my place to judge someone my age caught up in such hell. Civilian conduct in the war has often been criticised in Japan, especially on the political left. So have the socioeconomic developments of the postwar era. But Takahata’s critique combines the two subjects idiosyncratically. Too idiosyncratically, perhaps, to be effective. The examination of responsibility in Fireflies has implications for one of the most common charges against it. Some viewers, not least in countries that were once brutalised by Japan, have accused the film of exhibiting victim consciousness.87 As noted in the introduction, this view of history emphasises the innocence of ordinary Japanese people during the war, portraying them as tragic characters embroiled in a conflict not of their making, while skating over the suffering of their enemies. This description generally applies to other anime films about the war, which are discussed in the next chapter, but less so to Fireflies. It is worth noting that Takahata regularly called for more discussion of Japan’s colonial past. The film he wanted to make after Fireflies would have addressed this history head-on. Border 1939 (Kokkyo¯ bo¯da¯ 1939) was conceived as an epic tale of adventure and intrigue set in Korea and Manchuria, against the backdrop of Japan’s expansionism in Asia. It was to feature a Japanese student who’s caught up in the anti-Japanese resistance movement and comes to have misgivings about his country’s actions. In other words, it might have been the sort of film Takahata classed as ‘anti-war’. He outlined

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Border 1939 in a proposal published one year after the release of Fireflies;88 it is tempting to see the story as a response to criticism of that film. In the end, the project was halted after the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. Fireflies has the appearance of a victim narrative: it is a story of Japanese pain – children’s pain. And yet it strives to be the opposite. Far from ennobling its characters, it shows them acting irrationally, selfishly, cruelly. None question the premise of the war that’s causing them such distress, and several actively support it at the cost of helping each other. They aren’t victims so much as their own enemy. The film expects us to see people as responsible agents, implicitly rebutting the notion that civilians were duped into backing the war. And while victim narratives tend to commemorate the achievements of postwar Japan, Fireflies offers no such catharsis. The central characters don’t live to see society change, and in any case the film refuses to commemorate anything of the sort. But these messages are easily lost, as argued above. Then there is the central role of Setsuko, the one true innocent, whose suffering leaves a deep impression. Hence why the film ends up vulnerable to the accusation of victim consciousness, and why someone like Susan Napier, an astute anime scholar and a notable critic of Fireflies, can describe the film as ‘an endless nightmarish vision of passivity and despair’.89 On its director’s terms, then, Fireflies partly failed. Few have approached it as a critique of Japanese society and historical memory. But then there is much more to the film than that. It is also, among other things, an ambitious exercise in naturalistic animation, an engaging drama and a paean to the endurance of beauty in the darkest of times. With great patience, it devotes its attention to two people whom everyone else has shunned. In these respects, Fireflies is so effective, so moving, that we struggle to view its characters objectively. It is as though Takahata underestimated the emotional power of his own work. A strange failure indeed.

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3 The Legacy: A Rethinking of Animation Fireflies and Totoro opened in Japanese cinemas on 16 April 1988, a date that landed awkwardly between the school vacation and the extended public holiday known as Golden Week. Whether for this or other reasons, the double bill failed to set the box office alight, drawing some 450,000 spectators in its initial five-week run – around as many as went to see Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 2001) on its first day. A rerelease in August brought the total gross to 980 million yen against a budget of around one billion yen. The result was unimpressive enough that one industry figure was moved to proclaim the end of Ghibli. Yet the studio was already at work on its next film, Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no takkyu¯ bin, 1989), which became the first of a run of bona fide hits. In contrast, Fireflies was widely admired by critics and filmmakers. It was voted the sixth-best film of the year by the respected film magazine Kinema Junpo¯ (Totoro came first). Veteran animator Yasuji Mori quipped that the portrayal of Setsuko merited a ‘best actress’ award. Akira Kurosawa wrote a letter praising the film as his favourite Ghibli work, but sent it to Miyazaki, believing him to be the director.90 Miyazaki himself reportedly grumbled that no son of a navy lieutenant would ever act as Seita does, but eventually conceded that Fireflies was Takahata’s masterpiece. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the film’s power came from Nosaka, who described his first viewing: ‘[L]ate at night after some fairly heavy drinking, I watched it alone. Although I knew it was animation, I was somehow brought back 43 years. Watching just a few opening scenes kept me crying until dawn.’91 Fireflies really found its fame outside the cinema. It was first shown on television on 11 August 1989, netting a solid rating of

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20.9 per cent and launching a tradition of roughly biennial broadcasts on Friday evenings, usually timed around the anniversary of Japan’s surrender on 15 August. In contrast with the quasiarthouse branding it has generally received outside Japan, the film was thus regularly placed before a primetime audience in its homeland. In the process, it was divorced from Totoro – and the double bill’s perspective on Sho¯wa history as a whole – and placed at the heart of commemorations of the war. It was also widely screened at schools. Children wrote to Takahata with their impressions – typically, variations on ‘war is sad’. Before long, boosted by Ghibli’s growing stature, Fireflies became both a key text in popular culture and a significant influence on public memory of the war. It spawned parodies, fan theories and merchandise (Sakuma issued a commemorative tin of fruit drops); tourists started visiting the iconic pond, which exists to this day. A 2000 survey by public broadcaster NHK found that, among people in the age bracket ‘teens to thirties’, cinema shaped perceptions of the war more than any other media, with Fireflies and Barefoot Gen mentioned more than any other film.92 Five years later, the culture magazine Aera polled people in their thirties and forties on the movies that made them cry the most. Women ranked Fireflies first and men placed it second after Ghost (1990).93 Meanwhile, the film reached the rest of the world by trickles, as foreign audiences started recognising the quality of Ghibli’s work and the studio developed its international distribution strategy. Fireflies played (without subtitles!) at the 1991 edition of the Annecy Festival, the world’s most prominent animation showcase, on the recommendation of the influential director René Laloux. Five years later, it was screened at the G7 summit in Lyon – an early indication that it was entering the canon of war cinema. A subtitled VHS came out in North America in 1993, but British audiences only got a home video release in 2004, once the success of Spirited Away had cemented the Ghibli brand worldwide. Fireflies has subsequently received multiple rereleases and limited theatrical runs in both

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Sakuma’s commemorative tin (© Sakumaseika Co., Ltd.)

Actor Aki Asakura visits the Fireflies pond and (now blocked-up) shelter in the documentary Ghibli’s Scenes: Visiting the Japan Depicted by Isao Takahata (2014)

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territories, ensuring that the bulk of Anglophone viewers have approached it not just as a work of animation, and more precisely anime, but specifically as a ‘Ghibli’ feature. The three labels often carry particular, and somewhat contradictory, associations outside Japan: animation is for children (a prejudice also found among Japanese audiences in 1988); anime addresses adolescent appetites for sex, violence and sci-fi; Ghibli equals Miyazaki, especially his brand of high fantasy.94 Fireflies confounds all these preconceptions, and many English-language reviews are marked by a tone of surprise verging on disbelief, which is captured in this headline from The A.V. Club: ‘One of the saddest wartime dramas ever is an animated movie.’95 Blindsided critics describe the film’s impact in the language of war: ‘shellshock’, ‘trauma’, ‘emotional surrender’. Roger Ebert was no less stunned: ‘Grave of the Fireflies is an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation.’96 The previous chapter considered how animation serves the way Fireflies tells its story. Reviews like this remind us that the medium benefits the film in another way, which has to do with audience expectations. As Takahata well knew, an image can lose its impact through overexposure. War saturates our news cycle and live-action cinema to the point where many of us have grown desensitised to its horror. But real-world conflicts and terrible suffering are rarely shown in animation. By presenting these things in an unfamiliar context, Fireflies re-impresses their existence on its unsuspecting audience. One could say much the same about its studied depiction of people’s everyday habits and mannerisms. In other words, Fireflies exploits the element of surprise. Perhaps more than any other film, it has demonstrated how compelling animation can be as a vehicle for realism. Reanimating the war After the release of Fireflies, the genre of ‘war anime’ boomed. There were a few factors behind this, such as the cycle of fifty-year

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anniversaries of the Pacific War that began in 1991; in any case, Takahata’s feature wasn’t the first example of war anime. But its high profile surely emboldened film-makers to tackle similar subject matter. Some of these films were made by former Ghibli collaborators, and many borrow from the narrative structure and visual language of Fireflies. However, with exceptions, they are made more cheaply and have little of its artistry. What’s more, they tend to promote a view of history quite at odds with Takahata’s. The genre is diverse in one aspect: it spotlights many facets of the Japanese experience of war. We learn about the firebombing of Tokyo in The Glass Rabbit (Garasu no usagi, 2005), the evacuation of urban children in Kayoko’s Diary (Ushiro no sho¯men daare, 1991), the repatriation of civilians from the colonies in Rail of the Star (O-hoshi-sama no re¯ru, 1990) and the Soviet annexation of the Kuril Islands in Giovanni’s Island (Jobanni no shima, 2014). The atom bombs, particularly Hiroshima’s, are a recurring subject. But as these examples indicate, the genre focuses closely on the home front, and children almost always take centre stage. One explanation is that many of these works are based on memoirs by people who were children in the war. At the same time, this trope serves to deflect awkward questions of complicity and responsibility. The heroes are often younger and so more purely innocent than Seita. The rare adult protagonists are generally civilians and tend to be possessed of an almost ethereal virtue – take the selfless doctor tending to bomb victims in Nagasaki 1945: The Angelus Bells (Nagasaki 1945: Anzerasu no kane, 2005). These films are also alike in their dramatic structure. In many cases, they contain a frame narrative that introduces the aged protagonist in the modern day, so we know they survived. The main story is generally bracketed by the conflict with the US, leaving out the preceding phase of imperial expansion; landmark events from Pearl Harbor to surrender are namechecked as the mood on the mainland slowly darkens. Along the way, characters often exchange earnest yet vague sentiments about the atrocity of war. When the

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chauvinism of the time is referred to at all, it is projected onto characters who are either plainly nasty or later redeemed by a change of heart. The hero experiences great anguish – friends or family die – but emerges into a peaceful Japan. The story concludes on a note of optimism, as the character vows to honour the dead by remembering their sacrifice and upholding pacifism forever. Many of these stories are digressive and episodic, betraying their roots in autobiography. All are victim narratives in the truest sense, embracing a vision of wartime civilians as well-intentioned innocents who want peace, not victory. This kind of film leaves viewers with little scope for critical thinking, for it tells them that the Japan they live in has already attained what it needs. Peace and democracy came, albeit at a terrible cost, and are here to stay. The passing references to historical milestones and defining institutions of wartime society speak of the films’ educational purpose: they impart a textbook account of the period to young children, couched in a tear-jerking story of heroism in dark times.97 Two films on the fringes of the genre warrant special mentions. Beneath the Black Rain (Kuroi ame ni utarete, 1984) is based, like Barefoot Gen, on a manga by Keiji Nakazawa. It follows the intertwining lives of adults in postwar Hiroshima as they try to cope with the physical and emotional scars of the bomb. One woman agonises over whether her baby will carry mutant genes, while another takes revenge by turning to prostitution and giving syphilis to US servicemen. The film exemplifies a kind of victim narrative that centres on the uniquely dreadful effects of nuclear weapons; the subtext is that they cancel out, or even surpass, crimes committed by Japan. Where it diverges from other war anime – apart from in its mature themes – is in its insistence that peace and prosperity haven’t simply healed Japan. Trauma lingers. Then there is Miyazaki’s own The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu, 2013), an exquisitely rendered, morally erratic quasi-biopic of Jiro¯ Horikoshi, the designer of Japan’s deadliest fighter plane. The story is mostly set in the years of war mobilisation preceding Pearl

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Harbor. Horikoshi is aware of his value to imperial Japan’s militaryindustrial complex, and his work – as the film tells it – requires him to compromise his pacifist ideals. But the film, which is dedicated to Horikoshi, is so enthralled by his creative genius that it ends up glossing over the destruction wreaked by his inventions. Takahata criticised it for that. Victory for their side Doubtful that Fireflies could do much to prevent war, Takahata became increasingly engaged thereafter in political activism, which he saw as a surer way to secure peace. In 2004, he teamed up with like-minded members of the Japanese film industry to found the collective Cineasts for Article 9 (Eigajin kyu¯jo¯ no kai). The name refers to the constitutional clause that bans Japan from initiating war, which the collective sought to defend to the letter. They had cause for concern: while the constitution hasn’t been revised since the postwar occupation, Article 9 has been subjected to a series of official ‘reinterpretations’, with the effect of gradually expanding the remit of the Self-Defense Forces – Japan’s de facto military – and diluting the principle of state pacifism. This process began after the Gulf War of 1990–1. Japan had resisted pressure from its allies to send troops to the Middle East in a civilian capacity, on the grounds that this would violate the spirit of its constitution. The country was promptly criticised abroad for its perceived passivity, and the humiliation caused public opinion to swing in favour of a more active role for the Self-Defense Forces. Thereafter, the forces participated in UN peacekeeping operations and cooperated closely with the US-led coalition in the war on terror, while carefully avoiding actual conflict. Meanwhile, the Japanese watched on with alarm as North Korea acquired nuclear weapons and China emerged as a military superpower. Such geopolitical shifts dented support for the absolutist pacifism espoused by Takahata, and provided grist to nationalists who dreamed of restoring Japan’s armed forces to greatness.

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This strain of nationalism came to power in 2012 with the election of Shinzo¯ Abe,98 a right-wing ideologue with an avowed ambition to scrap Article 9. As prime minister, Abe made no secret of his nostalgia for values and structures that were weakened or dismantled after the war: the authority of the emperor, the central role of religion in the state, respect for the national flag and anthem, and – most pressingly – the country’s capacity to project military power across the globe. In 2015, his administration passed laws to reinterpret the constitution once again: this time, the Self-Defense Forces were granted the right to engage in ‘collective self-defence’, which enables them to assist allies in combat zones abroad. To Abe’s supporters, this was a sensible precaution in a fast-changing security landscape. To his opponents, it looked like another step on the path to war. Those opponents are numerous. Abe’s laws, like every reinterpretation before them, triggered a fierce outcry. The prime minister ultimately refrained from trying to revise the constitution before resigning in late 2020; polls suggest the public wouldn’t have backed him in the obligatory referendum. But while his nationalist revisionism may not reflect current popular opinion, its ascent to the heart of government – something that would have been unthinkable earlier in the postwar era – revealed deep change in the Japanese polity. It reminded Takahata of the fragility of the country’s pacifist doctrine, which, after all, was younger than him. He believed Japan could stumble, even by accident, into a new conflict, and feared how his compatriots would respond if it did. Support for pacifism has been sustained by living memory of the horrors of war. But now the war generation is passing away: Nosaka died in 2015, Takahata in 2018. In his later years, the director argued that his fellow citizens had to sharpen their sense of social responsibility if peace was to last. He implored them to reflect on what it means to act for the public good, and what it takes to oppose war. This meant acknowledging how readily the population had gone along with it the last time.

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But in Takahata’s view, the Japanese people were only heading in the other direction. He found evidence for this in the films they were watching. In November 2004, at the inauguration of Cineasts for Article 9, he addressed the fledgling collective as the keynote speaker. After touching on the old propaganda film Momotaro, Sacred Sailors and the burgeoning genre of supposedly ‘anti-war’ anime, he warned that mindless sentimentality was triumphing over serious self-reflection in today’s society. As an example, he cited the recent popularity of weepies at the cinema. As he spoke, he may have been remembering, with some regret, how Fireflies had been received: Nowadays, the only films that become major hits are those that make people cry. This isn’t about feeling sadness or pity – people want to cry because they are moved. Saying ‘I cried’ becomes a compliment to the film. All the creators need to do is to get their audience to root for the hero … The power of a film to move audiences will always overwhelm its capacity to awaken reason and good sense. If this country becomes embroiled in another war – including the war on terror, or whatever they call it – my concern is that, just like in the war 60 years ago, most people will simply end up rooting for their side: Japan.99

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Notes Several cited works are collected in the volume Jiburi no kyo¯kasho 4: Hotaru no haka [Ghibli Textbook 4: Grave of the Fireflies], edited by Studio Ghibli and Bunshun Bunko (Tokyo: Bungei Bunshun, 2013). The volume is referred to hereafter as Kyo¯kasho. 1 Japan’s tangle of military engagements between 1931 and 1945 can be framed in various ways. I use the term ‘Pacific War’, as it denotes the conflict (1941–5) between the two combatants represented in Grave of the Fireflies: Japan and the US. This conflict must be seen in the broader context of World War II and Japan’s colonial expansion across Asia. 2 After the war, Nosaka learned that he had been adopted into the family. For the biographical information about him cited in this book, I rely on David C. Stahl, ‘Victimization and “Responseability”: Remembering, Representing, and Working Through Trauma in Grave of the Fireflies’, in David Stahl and Mark Williams (eds), Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 161–201. Stahl’s text is indebted in turn to Setsuji Shimizu’s research. 3 Takahata describes his experience of the firebombing at length in Kimi ga senso¯ o hosshinai naraba [If You Don’t Want War] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2015), pp. 7–25. 4 John O’Donnell of Central Park Media, the first company to release an Englishsubtitled version of the film (on VHS in 1993). Quoted in ‘Takahata and Nosaka:

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Two Grave Voices in Animation’, Animerica 2, no. 11 (1994): 11. 5 Yo¯ko Mure, ‘Neru mae ni kossori naita’ [‘I Wept Alone Before Sleeping’], in Kyo¯kasho, p. 154. 6 Charles Stockdale, ‘The 100 Best Animated Movies of All Time’, USA Today, 13 June 2018. Available online: (accessed 4 March 2020). 7 This phrase was used in a directive on ‘freedom of speech and the press’ issued by the offices of the occupation on 10 September 1945. It is quoted in John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), p. 407. 8 Philip A. Seaton, Japan’s Contest War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 34. Seaton puts the number of Japanese dead at 3.1 million and the number of people killed by Japan’s military at upwards of 20 million. Estimates for the latter figure vary widely, depending partly on how the war is defined (see Note 1 above), but tend to exceed the number of Japanese deaths by far. 9 Ibid., p. 144. 10 Isao Takahata, ‘Senso¯ to anime eiga’ [‘War and Anime Films’], 24 November 2004. Available online: (accessed 4 March 2020). 11 Quoted from a private video, shown to me by Ilan Nguyên, of a speech Takahata gave to schoolchildren at the

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cinema Le Palace in Beaumont-sur-Oise, France, on 27 February 2006. 12 Toshio Suzuki, Mixing Work with Pleasure: My Life at Studio Ghibli, trans. Roger Speares (Tokyo: Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2018), p. 99. Although Studio Ghibli was officially opened on 15 June 1985, its name was registered a year earlier (Suzuki doesn’t record the precise date). My account of the making of Fireflies is indebted to Suzuki’s writing, especially ‘“Hotaru no haka” ku¯deta¯ keikaku’ [‘“Grave of the Fireflies”: Planning a Coup d’État’], in Kyo¯kasho, pp. 37–54, as well as the official historical account ‘Sutajio Jiburi monogatari: “Hotaru no haka” hen’ [‘The Story of Studio Ghibli: “Grave of the Fireflies”’], in Kyo¯kasho, pp. 23–36, which has no identified author. 13 In-between artists receive a character’s key poses (which are drawn by more senior animators) and fill in the remaining frames to create the movement. 14 Working from the storyboard, layout artists (who are often senior animators) draw detailed blueprints for each shot, indicating the relative placement of characters, backgrounds and other elements. These drawings are annotated with descriptions of camera movements and other directions. The role is similar to a cinematographer’s in live action. 15 For more on the relative ‘fullness’ of Ghibli’s animation, see Tze-Yue G. Hu, Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), pp. 119–21.

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16 Suzuki, Mixing Work with Pleasure, p. 179. 17 The prize was jointly awarded to Nosaka’s American Hijiki (Amerika hijiki, 1967), a novella which satirises the wartime generation’s ambivalent feelings about Americans in the postwar years. 18 Toshio Suzuki, ‘Nihondate seisaku kara umareta kiseki’ [‘Producing a Double Bill Led to a Miracle’], in Jiburi no kyo¯kasho 3: Tonari no Totoro [Ghibli Textbook 3: My Neighbour Totoro], eds Studio Ghibli and Bunshun Bunko (Tokyo: Bungei Bunshun, 2013), pp. 40–1. 19 See, for instance, Helen McCarthy, Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1999), pp. 116–17. 20 Suzuki, ‘Ku¯deta¯ keikaku’, p. 39. 21 ‘Two Grave Voices in Animation’, p. 8. 22 Ibid. 23 Masahiro Haraguchi, Archives of Studio Ghibli, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1996), p. 66. 24 In the event, this decision was left to the exhibitors. It has been reported that most cinemas played Fireflies first, but I was unable to confirm this. 25 Haraguchi, Archives of Studio Ghibli, p. 78. 26 Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 24–8. 27 Stephen Rowley, ‘Life Reproduced in Drawings: Realism in Animation’, Sterow.com, 1 November 2006. Available online: (accessed 10 August 2020). Both Wells and Rowley

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ground their frameworks in analysis of Disney’s animated features. 28 Suzuki, Mixing Work with Pleasure, p. 103. 29 Isao Takahata, Eiga o tsukurinagara kangaeta koto [Thoughts While Making Movies] (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1991), p. 429. 30 Suzuki, Mixing Work with Pleasure, pp. 103–4. 31 Akiyuki Nosaka, ‘Anime osorubeshi’ [‘Anime Is Fearsome’], in Kyo¯kasho, p. 81. 32 Michiyo Yasuda, ‘Yakenohara no sekai ni au yo¯na enogu to cha-ka¯bon o tsukutta’ [‘I Created Colours and Brown Carbon to Go with the Scorched Landscapes’], in Kyo¯kasho, p. 116. 33 The feat would prove hard to replicate in other languages. In the first English dub of the film, Setsuko was voiced by Corinne Orr (credited as Rhoda Chrosite), who was around sixty years old. Shiraishi’s remarkable performance is one reason why I recommend watching the film with subtitles. 34 Masaaki Nomura, ‘Anime¯shon no satsuei genba wa, tsukurite no zuno¯ no naka ni aru’ [‘The Set of an Animated Movie Is Inside the Creator’s Head’], Animage, December 1987, p. 28. 35 Masaaki Nomura, ‘Iyoiyo o¯zume ’88 “Totoro” & “Hotaru” sutaffu retsuden’ [‘The End Is in Sight: Meeting the Staff on “Totoro” & “Fireflies” ’88’], Animage, March 1988, p. 82. 36 Takahata credited this film with inspiring him to work in animation. Grimault subsequently obtained the original negative, reworked the film and

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released a new cut under the title The King and the Mockingbird (Le Roi et l’oiseau, 1980). 37 Toshio Suzuki, ‘Takahata Isao to Miyazaki Hayao. Futari no kyosho¯ no “wakare-michi”’ [‘Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki: Two Masters “Part Ways”’], in Jiburi no kyo¯kasho 6: Omohide poroporo [Ghibli Textbook 6: Only Yesterday], eds Studio Ghibli and Bunshun Bunko (Tokyo: Bungei Bunshun, 2014), p. 37. 38 In 1966, The Pornographers was adapted into a brilliant film of the same name by Sho¯hei Imamura. 39 Stahl, ‘Victimization and “Responseability”’, p. 167. 40 Akiyuki Nosaka, ‘A Grave of Fireflies’, trans. James R. Abrams, Japan Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1978): 445. 41 Quoted in Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 180. 42 ‘Two Grave Voices in Animation’, p. 8. 43 The novella is mostly told in the third person, but intermittently slips into the first as Seita reminisces about his past. 44 Several commentators have suggested that this flash is meant as a reference to the atom bombs, and that the film is subtly layering the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki onto the children’s story. If this is true, it is incidental to the film’s main themes. 45 A government report in February 1948 estimated that there were 123,510 orphaned and homeless children in the country. See Dower, Embracing Defeat, p. 63.

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46 This association is captured in the film’s (and novella’s) Japanese title, which employs an unconventional spelling of the word hotaru (fireflies), 火垂る: the characters individually mean ‘fire falling’. 47 In this book, I use ‘camera’ and related terminology – ‘pan’, ‘zoom’ and so on – as shorthand for the film’s use of framing. 48 Takahata, Kimi ga senso¯ o hosshinai naraba, p. 18. 49 For a peerless analysis of Miyazaki’s approach to multiplanarity in cel animation, which has much in common with Takahata’s, see Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 3–100. 50 Akiyuki Nosaka, ‘Genso¯ “Hotaru no haka”’ [‘“Grave of the Fireflies”: An Illusion’], in Kyo¯kasho, pp. 208–9. 51 Hiroshi Echizenya has noted parallels between Fireflies and the ‘abused stepchild tale’ (mamako ijime-tan), a narrative template from classical Japanese literature in which an orphan is placed in the care of a wicked stepmother. Of course, this trope is also found outside Japan: the story of Snow White is just one example. 52 My analysis of colour is indebted to Oswald Iten’s excellent video essay ‘The Colors of “Grave of the Fireflies”’, which is available online: (accessed 4 March 2020). 53 Nosaka, ‘A Grave of Fireflies’, p. 453. 54 Ibid., p. 455. 55 Takahata, it should be said, endorsed Seita’s actions. He lambasted the

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wartime regime for endangering its civilians by putting them through ineffective firefighting procedures. 56 Nosaka, ‘A Grave of Fireflies’, p. 454. 57 Ibid., p. 457. 58 Ibid., p. 460. 59 ‘Two Grave Voices in Animation’, p. 7. 60 Nosaka, ‘A Grave of Fireflies’, p. 454. 61 Quoted in Antonella C. Sisto, Film Sound in Italy: Listening to the Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 81. Credit is due to Ilan Nguyên and Xavier Kawa-Topor for evoking Rossellini’s words in the context of Fireflies. 62 ‘Two Grave Voices in Animation’, p. 7. 63 Classic film adaptations of Chikamatsu’s plays include Kenji Mizoguchi’s Chikamatsu monogatari (1954) and Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (Shinju¯: Ten no Amijima, 1969). 64 Scholars have also observed that Nosaka’s prose resembles the meandering, ambiguous sentences of Chikamatsu and other writers of his time. 65 Takahata, Eiga o tsukurinagara kangaeta koto, p. 420. 66 Nosaka, ‘A Grave of Fireflies’, p. 457. 67 Quoted in ‘Taishu¯ goraku anime¯shon sakuhin no aratana kano¯sei o mosaku suru “Hotaru” staffu’ [‘The “Fireflies” Staff Striving to Expand the Boundaries of Mass-Entertainment Animation’], Animage, June 1987, p. 18. 68 ‘Two Grave Voices in Animation’, p. 10. 69 The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals, which tracks the titular city’s efforts to depollute its medieval canal network, is the sole documentary and only liveaction work in Takahata’s filmography.

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70 These poetic cutaways have been termed ‘pillow shots’, after a similar device in Ozu’s cinema. They give the film a distinct pacing, breaking up the narrative flow. 71 This scene was key-animated by Hideaki Anno, who would later direct the seminal anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shinseiki Evangerion, 1995–6). Anno depicted the battleship with great thoroughness, and was dismayed to find that much of the detail ended up blacked out in the film. He told this anecdote during ‘Animator: Hideaki Anno’, a talk he gave at the Tokyo International Film Festival on 26 October 2014; I thank Andrew Osmond for providing me with his notes from the event. 72 In an internal production document, Ghibli identified Forbidden Games as the film to which Fireflies could be most immediately compared. See Haraguchi, Archives of Studio Ghibli, p. 67. 73 Quoted in Stahl, ‘Victimization and “Response-ability”’, p. 171. 74 Nosaka, ‘A Grave of Fireflies’, p. 456. 75 Ibid., p. 460. 76 Haraguchi, Archives of Studio Ghibli, p. 25. 77 Takahata, Eiga o tsukurinagara kangaeta koto, p. 442. 78 Ibid., pp. 419–20. 79 Ibid., pp. 445–7. 80 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, pp. 165–6. 81 Takahata, Kimi ga senso¯ o hosshinai naraba, pp. 44–63. 82 ‘Two Grave Voices in Animation’, p. 9. 83 Quoted in Stahl, ‘Victimization and “Response-ability”’, p. 167.

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84 Takahata, Eiga o tsukurinagara kangaeta koto, pp. 443–4. 85 Takahata, Kimi ga senso¯ o hosshinai naraba, p. 4. 86 ‘Two Grave Voices in Animation’, p. 9. 87 Charges of victim consciousness derailed the film’s planned release in South Korea (a former Japanese colony) in 2005. It finally came out in 2014. 88 Reproduced in Takahata, Eiga o tsukurinagara kangaeta koto, pp. 456–9. 89 Susan Napier, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 163. Napier describes Fireflies as ‘victim’s history’, comparing it unfavourably with Barefoot Gen. 90 This anecdote was told by Toshio Suzuki and Kurosawa’s daughter Kazuko in the 25 March 2008 episode of the podcast Suzuki Toshio no Jiburi asemamire [Toshio Suzuki’s Sweating It Out at Ghibli]. 91 Quoted in Stahl, ‘Victimization and “Response-ability”’, p. 187. 92 Akihiro Yamamoto, ‘“Hotaru no haka” no media bunkaron’ [‘A Media Studies Perspective on “Grave of the Fireflies”’], Ko¯be Gaidai ronso¯ [Journal of Kobe City University of Foreign Studies] 64, no. 3 (2014): 69. 93 Ibid., p. 80. 94 See Rayna Denison, Anime: A Critical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 119–22. 95 Nick Schager, ‘One of the saddest wartime dramas ever is an animated movie’, The A.V. Club, 17 June 2015. Available online: (accessed 20 October 2020). 96 Roger Ebert, ‘Great Movie: Grave of the Fireflies’, RogerEbert.com, 19 March 2000. Available online: (accessed 4 March 2020). 97 Fireflies is arguably closer in spirit to the recent string of European animated features that deal with (mostly nonEuropean) conflicts. Launched by

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the triumphs of Persepolis (2007) and Waltz with Bashir (Vals im Bashir, 2008), this genre embraces psychological complexity, and its more adult-oriented films often address their subject from a position of moral relativism. Other examples include The Breadwinner (2017), Funan (2018), Chris the Swiss (2018) and Another Day of Life (2018). 98 Abe’s election was actually a re-election, as he had already served a term in 2006–7. 99 Takahata, ‘Senso¯ to anime eiga’.

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Credits Note: The Japanese script leaves ambiguity in how personal names should be read (and thus transliterated). While every effort has been made to ascertain the correct readings of the names below, this has not always been possible. We apologise for any inaccuracies. Grave of the Fireflies Japan 1988 Director Isao Takahata Screenplay Isao Takahata Animation Production Studio Ghibli Producer To¯ru Hara Original Story Akiyuki Nosaka Original Score Michio Mamiya Music Production Tokuma Japan Co. Song ‘Home Sweet Home’ performed by Amelita Galli-Curci. Courtesy of RCA Victor Red Seal, a division of BMG Classics. Animation Director Yoshifumi Kondo¯

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Assistant Animation Directors Yoshiyuki Momose Natsuyo Yasuda Character Design Yoshifumi Kondo¯ Layout Yoshiyuki Momose Art Director Nizo¯ Yamamoto Colour Design Michiyo Yasuda Shinchosha Grave of the Fireflies Production Committee Shunichi Sato¯ Takashi Nitta Kenjiro¯ Yagi Kunioki Hatsumi Tadahiko Arai Kenji Sasaki Takanobu Sato¯ Shizuya Shibata Takuo Murase Executive Producer Ryo¯ichi Sato¯ Key Animation Kuniyuki Ishii Yukiyoshi Hane Noriko Moritomo ¯ tani Atsuko O Hideo Kawauchi Reiko Okuyama Sho¯juro¯ Yamauchi Noboru Takano Yoshiji Kigami Kitaro¯ Ko¯saka Toshiyasu Okada Michiyo Sakurai Akio Sakai Iku Ishiguro

Hiroshi Ogawa Megumi Kagawa Yasuomi Umetsu Hideaki Anno Shunji Saida ¯ seki Noriko O Animation Check Naoshi Ozawa Eiko Yabuki In-between Animation Takao Yoshino Hiroyuki Horiuchi Yoshimi Kanbara Kasumi Hara Eiichiro¯ Hirata Masashi Kaneko Shigehito Tsuji Hitoshi Kagiyama Shiro¯ Shibata Tatsuji Narita Tsutomu Awada Hiroshi Inada Ako Takano Hiromi Kosuda Yoshie Kawahashi Sumie Nishido Yu¯ichi Katayama Mayumi Suzuki Yumi Kawachi Atsushi Irie Midori Yamada Takao Maki ¯ ta Tokihiko O Nobuko Sato¯ Akemi Motohashi Mayumi Fujimoto Yu¯ko Ogawa Keiko Sakuma Seiji Tanda Takuya Iinuma ¯ uchi Masahiko O

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Yuriko Saito¯ Eiichiro¯ Nishiyama Osamu Tanabe Yo¯ko Kida Junko Isaka Midori Nagaoka Tomoko Takei Chieko Shiobara Yuzumi Enosawa Sachiko Yoneyama Tazuko Fukutsuchi Hideaki Furusawa Hiroyuki Kamura Aya Sato¯ Do¯ga Ko¯bo¯ Oh! Production Dragon Production Group Linus Studio Pokke Studio Jam Assistant Art Director Katsu Hisamura Background Art Mutsuo Koseki Shu¯ichi Hirata To¯ru Hishiyama Noriko Higuchi Seiki Tamura Yoshinari Kinbako Yo¯ji Nakaza Fukiko Hashizume Eiko Sudo¯ Eiji Hirakawa Junko Ina Special Effects Kunji Tanifuji Ink & Paint Check Noriko Ogawa Yuriko Kashiwakura

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Ink & Paint Yumi Furuya Yukiko Matsushita ¯ take Kyo¯ko O Norichika Iwakiri Michiko Nishimaki Naomi Takahashi Mayumi Watabe Nobuko Watanabe Harumi Machii Takiko Kubota Toshiko Tawara Mieko Asai Yu¯ki Takagi Reiko Nanami Kimie Ishida Hisako Shitara Tokuko Harada Yasuko Yamaguchi ¯ no Etsuko O Yoshimi Sakuma Nobuko Nakata Yumiko Ichikawa Taeko Sakuma Fujino Yonei Haremi Miyakawa Rie Aoki Matsuko Horii Takao Yoshikawa Shizuko Hirai Nobuko Sano Nobuko Igarashi Kazue Shiki Chieko Machida Michiyo Iseda Reiko Aonuma Michiko Shibata Hideko Sato¯ Kazue Hiranuma Ikue Nakayama Shinichi Toyonaga

Manami Beppu Yumi Hattori Yukitaka Shishikai Tsutomu Kosuge Junko Igarashi Akemi Hosotani Rie Yasui Fumiko Saito¯ Yoshiko Takasago Junko Yoshikawa Homi Abe Studio Killy Studio Deen Dragon Production IM Studio Trace Studio M Bobby Planning Studio Korumi Studio OZ Studio Kuma Do¯musha Shaft Studio Angel Studio Tomcat Cel Arts Studio Director of Photography Nobuo Koyama Photography Lucky More Hideo Okazaki Tsuguo Ozawa Atsushi Kageyama Shinji Ito¯ Naoyuki Taniguchi Masashi Abe Akitaro¯ Daichi Editing Takeshi Seyama

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Editing Assistant Hiroshi Adachi Titles Hideo Takagu Toshiko Tagami Sound Director Yasuo Uragami Sound Effects ¯ hira Noriyoshi O Michihiro Ito¯ (E&M Planning Center) Sound Mixing ¯ shiro Hisanori O Production Manager Shinichiro¯ Ueda Production Desk Naoyuki Oshikiri Production Assistants Chiyoshi Tanaka Atsushi Kamimura Fumihiko Shimo Goro¯ Morita Tomoaki Nishigiri Assistant to the Director Norihiko Suto¯ Technical Assistance Jo¯sai Duplo – Mamoru Murao Stack – Yoshihiro Saito¯, Masanori Michie Sound Production Audio Planning U Recording Studio APU Studio Film Development Tokyo Laboratory Dolby Stereo Technical Support Continental Far East Inc.

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Consultant Mikio Mori VOICE CAST (Original) Tsutomu Tatsumi Seita Ayano Shiraishi Setsuko Yoshiko Shinohara Mother Akemi Yamaguchi Aunt Ko¯zo¯ Hashida Masayo Sakai Kazumi Nozaki Yoshio Matsuoka Masahiro Kanetake Kiyoshi Yanagawa Hajime Maki Atsuo Omote Teruhisa Harita Hiroshi Tanaka Michio Denpo¯ Shiro¯ Tamaki Tadashi Nakamura Mika Sekita Mariko Miyamoto Jun Matsumoto Haruko Matsuda Keiko Ueda Kazuhiko Takeoka Kiyomi Ajisaka Makio Ueno Toyokazu Hiramatsu Kyo¯ko Moriwaki Ryu¯ji Shimatani Takatsugu Sanada Kuni Tamotsu Haruo Kaji Toshiko Ama

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Makoto Kobayashi Kenichi Sawada Akitoshi Kumamoto Ikuo Kokubu Yu¯suke Yokoyama Yoshinaga Fusamoto Ko¯shiro¯ Tanimoto Masato Moriya Tetsuro¯ Nakayama Naoki Fujita Masafumi Jo¯no Satoshi Ban Makiko Kinoshita Sengoku Yukihara Yu¯ko Kurokawa Mayumi Kawaguchi VOICE CAST (1998 English-language version) J. Robert Spencer Seita Rhoda Chrosite Setsuko Amy Jones Aunt Veronica Taylor Mother Nick Sullivan Shannon Conley Crispin Freeman George Leaver Dan Green 1998 English dub produced by Skypilot Entertainment for Central Park Media.

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VOICE CAST (2012 English-language version) Adam Gibbs Seita Emily Neves Setsuko Marcy Bannor Aunt Shelley Calene-Black Mother Luci Christian Justin Doran Susan Koozin Andrew Love David Matranga Rob Mungle Samuel Roman Blake Shepard David Wald

In colour. 16:9. Released in Japan by Toho Company on 16 April 1988. Running time: 88 minutes. Released theatrically in the US by GKIDS on 12 August 2018. MPAA rating: unrated. Running time: 88 minutes. Released theatrically in the UK by StudioCanal on 24 May 2013. BBFC certificate: 12. Running time: 88 minutes 47 seconds.

2012 English dub produced by Seraphim Digital for Sentai Filmworks.

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