I just watched... Grave of the Fireflies

Home Sweet Home

                Now I’m not a very metaphysical man, but if I were to get down and biblical I’d say that I really like the concept of the Seven Sins. Not because of what they are, but because of what they represent in mankind. You see, the catch of the Sins, is that yes, they are sins, but an inescapable truth is that all humans bear the Sins in some shape or form, which places our existence into a somewhat paradoxical plane as we try to avoid the Sins while being unable to change the fact that the Sins exist within us, that we are the Sins.

                We are all envious, gluttonous, lustful, wrathful, greedy, slothful and prideful in some way shape or form, and that’s a pretty straightforward truth about life. Of all the Sins, the one that’s always intrigued me was Pride. Oh, what an interesting sin Pride is, something that you cannot live without, to the extent that an absence of Pride is more likely to harm you than its presence (as I have learned in life) and in many ways it is a hard to define sin.

                Sure, having an unquenchable passion for yourself and your work can easily be considered to be pride in its most ‘recognisable’ form, but when the question is broached regarding pride for others, that’s when things get hazy. Does holding great Pride for the sake of one’s country, one’s friends and one’s family count as a sin?

                But at the same time this broaches another question: whether the Sins are truly sins. Is there any joy without a lust for life? Is there any reward without a desire for gluttonous indulgence? Is there any ambition without greed and envy? I suppose another way to look at the Sins is that they aren’t sins, just base human instincts that can be considered ‘evil’ due to our one fundamental flaw: we are all humans. An indulgence in these instincts, these emotions, these Sins is generally beyond self-destructive and dabbling too much into any one is likely to do much more than just harm you.

The humble, 'selfless' patriot.

                I suppose Grave of the Fireflies can be defined as a movie you wouldn’t enjoy watching, and probably one you wouldn’t really want to re-watch anytime down the line. It’s still a movie you should watch for multiple reasons.

                One of the most heart-wrenching aspects of the movie, for me, was not even a part of the movie, but is the fact that the movie could be considered to be an auto-biographical story with a bit of wish fulfilment thrown in, and is simultaneously an apologetic story. The ‘wish fulfilment’ aspect will be rather clear once you have seen the movie and just helps it hang over your mind like a misty umbrella all the more.

                The movie knows what it’s about and where it wants to go, evident in the premise of two young siblings struggling to survive in a bomb-scarred Kobe.

Setsuko and Seita form the heart of the movie. 

                To be fair I already knew plenty about the movie before I watched, and knew what to expect (since I knew what happens) but it still managed to surprise me a fair bit. Perhaps because it is more than a story of bitter struggle and suffering, more to the extent that I actually wished, in part, that it would be only about pain. It goes beyond the pain and instead talks more about society, human nature and human flaws.

Living at the mercy of others.

Swallowing one's pride. 

                I’d say that the movie was ‘disappointing’, not in the typical sense of ‘disappointing’ but that it left me feeling disappointed about many things, disappointed by humanity, our flaws and our imbibed mentalities. Disappointed by the actions some people take and the stands that some people take.

Reality.

                It’s not anti-war by just showing the ravages of war on land and man, but the ravages of war on the mind, on culture and on society. In many ways a much more horrifying image than just that of broken buildings and broken people.

                It’s rather easy to see why this movie was responsible for breaking many barriers in people’s minds between animated works and serious storytelling, though there were bound to be people who went into this expecting something comical or showed this to their children (never mind the fact that the name ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ doesn’t imply anything happy or cheerful or filled with purple dinosaurs). But I suppose the reason for this is that this is a story that anyone can watch, and anyone can be affected by, the kind that’s hard to forget, the kind that makes you hate many of its characters yet makes you unable to do anything but grudgingly sympathise with why they act the way that they do. It gives an insight into the reasoning behind human flaws.

                It has aged visually, but it still holds up today, like many of the studio’s other works and they still exude their own expressions and style, especially during one of the movie’s signature moments involving the eponymous insects.

                In many ways it wasn’t what I expected, and in retrospect that’s what it made it significant for me. I thought that since I knew the premise, the plot, the consequences and the tone, that I knew what to expect, that I’d feel the way I expected to feel and react the way I expected to react. I was wrong, and though I felt strange at first, the fact that it was so dissonant from what I pictured, what I expected is perhaps what made it what it is.

“Why must fireflies die so young?”