Film Review 1

From the powerhouse Studio Ghibli, the film Grave of the Fireflies is set during WWII in Japan and based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Akiyuki Nosaka. The protagonist Seita, a fourteen-year old boy, tries to survive the trauma of war after his mother is killed in an air raid. Seita cares for his very young sister Setsuko. Seita and Setsuko at first move in with an aunt, but she cheats them out of their meager resources and berates Seita for not working to contribute to the war effort. Her blind nationalism causes her to sacrifice her own family members to the war. In the end the children suffer illness and starvation, desperately trying to survive in an abandoned shelter. Seita steals, bargains, and salvages their meager 7,000-yen in their mother’s account to try to survive. The whereabouts of their Naval officer father is unknown and in the end he is feared dead. This dramatic portrayal of war from the perspective of children is beautifully animated and unfolds with literary devices imbedded in each shot. Unpacking the metaphors and symbolic meanings makes this film an especially challenging pieces for a secondary language arts class. I am interested in either recommending this film to our World History teacher or using it in comparison with Eli Wiesel’s memoir Night. I’m intrigued by the idea of comparing two WWII Holocausts: one we caused and the other we watched until the very end. As the language arts teachers I would ask students to critically analyze how these two narratives were written.
edited by cgao on 8/11/2015