Grave of the Fireflies

Grave of the Fireflies starts with the death of its young protagonist Seita, starving to death as a tramp in a subway. The rest of the movie is a flashback from his ghost, starting from the firebombing of his village during World War II that left he and his younger sister Setsuko orphaned and homeless. They stay with their aunt for a while but she's a cruel woman so they leave her and live in a hillside bomb shelter, scrounging for food wherever they can.

This has got to be one of the most depressing movies I've ever watched. It's a very subdued movie which makes it all the more human when it sinks into moments of grief and suffering. Afterwards, I wondered what was the point of making a movie like this. It reads very well as an anti-war film, an exploration of how it destroys innocent individuals from the inside out. Seita starts off as a proud, well-off kind of guy but by the end he has nothing left in the world and has lost his will to live.

According to Wikipedia however, the director (Isao Takahata) never intended an anti-war message because the film is more concerned with 'conveying the image of a brother and sister living a failed life due to isolation from society'. I guess what he's trying to say is that if you made it an anti-war film, then it has a message of 'look at all these bad things that happen because of war' and that would reduce the tragedy of the events because they would have a meaning and a purpose. But there is no meaning to the events of the film. Noone comes out wiser and everything is just absurd (in this sense of the word). The fact that the film is partly based on a true story is enough to justify its necessity.

I wish now that I hadn't picked this as my last Ghibli film to watch until after Trials. It was such a depressing note to end it on. After watching this movie, I thought about it and then I thought of the exuberance of Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away and I felt really bad.