Seita and Setsuko leave their aunt's home after excessive insults, and they move into an abandoned bomb shelter. They release fireflies into the shelter for light. The next day, Setsuko is horrified to find that the insects have died. She buries them in a grave, asking why they and her mother had to die. As they run out of rice, Seita steals from farmers and loots homes during air raids, for which he is beaten and sent to the police. The officer realizes Seita is stealing due to hunger and releases him. When Setsuko falls ill, a doctor explains that she is suffering from malnutrition. Desperate, Seita withdraws the last of the money in their mother's bank account. After doing so, he becomes distraught when he learns that Japan has surrendered, and that his father, an Imperial Japanese Navy captain, is most likely dead, as most of Japan's navy has been sunk. Seita returns to Setsuko with food, but finds her dying. She later dies as Seita finishes preparing the food. Seita cremates Setsuko's body and her stuffed doll in a straw casket. He carries her ashes in the candy tin along with his father's photograph.
That September, Seita dies of starvation at a Sannomiya train station surrounded by other malnourished people, as shown in medias res. A janitor is tasked with removing the bodies before the arrival of the Americans. The janitor sorts through Seita's possessions and finds the candy tin, which he throws into a field. Setsuko's ashes spread out, and her spirit springs from the tin and is joined by Seita's spirit and a cloud of fireflies. They board a ghostly train and, throughout the journey, look back at the events leading to Seita's death. Their spirits later arrive at their destination, healthy and happy. Surrounded by fireflies, they rest on a hilltop bench overlooking present-day Kobe.
full movie of Fireflies
Isao Takahata said that he was compelled to film the short story after seeing how the main character, Seita, "was a unique wartime ninth grader".[10] Takahata explained that any wartime story, whether animated or not animated, "tends to be moving and tear-jerking", and that young people develop an "inferiority complex" where they perceive people in wartime eras as being more noble and more able than they are, and therefore the audience believes that the story has nothing to do with them. Takahata argued that he wanted to dispel this mindset.[9] When Nosaka asked if the film characters were "having fun", Takahata answered that he clearly depicted Seita and Setsuko had "substantial" days and that they were "enjoying their days".[11] Takahata said that Setsuko was even more difficult to animate than Seita, and that he had never before depicted a girl younger than five.[9] Takahata said that "In that respect, when you make the book into a movie, Setsuko becomes a tangible person", and that four-year-olds often become more assertive and self-centered, and try to get their own ways during that age. He explained that while one could "have a scene where Seita can't stand that anymore", it is "difficult to incorporate into a story".[12] Takahata explained that the film is from Seita's point of view, "and even objective passages are filtered through his feelings".[11]
Takahata said that he had considered using non-traditional animation methods, but because "the schedule was planned and the movie's release date set, and the staff assembled, it was apparent there was no room for such a trial-and-error approach".[11] He further remarked that he had difficulty animating the scenery since, in Japanese animation, one is "not allowed" to depict Japan in a realistic manner.[9] Animators often traveled to foreign countries to do research on how to depict them, but such research had not been done before for a Japanese setting.[9] While animating the movie, Takahata also created several different cuts of the scene in which Seita cremates Setsuko's body. Takahata spent a lot of time on this scene, trying to create the perfect iteration of it. Each of these cuts remained unfinished and unused in the end.[13]
On 25 December 2016, Toei Company made a Twitter post that read "Why did Kiriya have to die so soon?" (なんできりやすぐ死んでしまうん, Nande Kiriya sugu shinde shimaun?) in order to promote an episode of Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. The hashtag became popular, but Toei deleted the tweet after receiving complaints that referencing the Grave of the Fireflies line "Why do fireflies die so soon?" (なんで蛍すぐ死んでしまうん, Nande hotaru sugu shinde shimaun) was in poor taste.[44] Before that, the ranking website Goo's readers voted the film's ending the number 1 most miserable of all anime films.[45]
Following the success of Grave of the Fireflies, Takahata drew up an outline for a follow-up film, based on similar themes but set in 1939 at the start of the second World War. This film was called Border 1939, based on the novel The Border by Shin Shikata, and would have told the story of a Japanese teenager from colonial Seoul joining an anti-Japanese resistance group in Mongolia. The film was intended as an indictment of Japanese imperialist sentiment, which is briefly touched upon in Grave of the Fireflies. Although Takahata finished a full outline (which is republished in his book Thoughts While Making Movies), the film was canceled before production could start due to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Public opinion in Japan had turned against China, and Ghibli's distributor felt a film partly set there was too risky.[49]
Although "Citizen Kane" is one of my favorite films, and it shuttles relentlessly between past and present, I'm often uneasy with movies where different actors play the same characters at different times. It helps when the character past and present has obvious distinctions. I lost too much time during "Fireflies in the Garden" reminding myself "This must be young Jane," and suchlike.
Other important characters: Lisa's teenage sister Jane (Hayden Panetierre); Jane as a married adult (Emily Watson); her husband, Jimmy Lawrence (George Newbern); Jane and Michael's sister, Ryne (Shannon Lucio), and Jane and Jimmy's two children, who unhelpfully live in the Taylor family home, so that time past and present seem to cross in the same space.
Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓, Hotaru no haka) is a Japanese anime drama movie published in 1988 through Studio Ghibli. The movie is based on a novel written in 1967 by Nosaka Akiyuki and discusses the story of fourteen-year-old Seita and four-year-old Setsuko, who are trying to survive in Kobe, Japan in 1945 during the second world war (Scherer, 2016).
Until today the movie is one of the most-watched movies that thematizes the second world war and is shown on national television in Japan every year on August 15th which is the day the war stopped for the Japanese (Racel, 2021). This shows that the movie is culturally and historically very important for the country and its society. Also, Racel (2021) pointed out that Grave of the Fireflies tries to teach young people to dislike war and the system behind it that led to the event happening, more than it demonstrates hate for the Allies. Still, even after more than 60 years, the Japanese actively choose to portray themselves in a certain way of victimhood and keep teaching about it while the rest of Asia perceives and remembers the second world war from a very different point of view (Racel, 2021).
In conclusion, it can be said that Grave of the Fireflies is a complex movie that can teach a viewer many things when being investigated a bit deeper. While on the surface the movie might seem to feed into the Japanese victimhood portrayal by making the viewer empathize with the two orphans who throughout the movie lose everything, it is also a critic connected to nationalism and the way it sometimes turns people blind for anything beyond it. Furthermore, the movie has many details that can be interpreted in different ways and linked to the Japanese culture as well as history and the country's development. Overall, the movie is well made and despite its sad and dark background, enjoyable to watch while also being rich in culture and historical aspects.
In his film Fireflies in the Garden, Dennis Lee comes up empty. Kids, parents, siblings, an aunt and an estranged wife all bicker and yell, but the noise cancels itself out. The movie is one long argument, tiresome and repetitive, that produces more heat than light. The wonder is that the first-time writer-director rounded up a cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss and Julia Roberts.
Dafoe never gets a handle on his overbearing character. Similarly, Roberts spends her rather brief screen time trying to pacify other people, her husband, her son and then her sister without ever getting a chance to define who her character is. The movie pretty much wastes Watson, and Moss seems to have dropped in from another movie. Only Reynolds comes off with some dimension and charm as a guy whose affability increases with the distance he puts between himself and his dad.
Some critics, most notably Roger Ebert, consider it to be one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made.[2] Animation historian Ernest Rister compares the film to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and says, "it is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen."
The movie begins in modern-day Sannomiya Station, Kōbe, Hyōgo Prefecture, but then quickly flashes back to the past. Seita lies on the platform in rags and is dying from starvation. An onlooker remarks at how dirty he looked while another says, "The American troops will be arriving soon. It would be an embarrassment if they find such a guy here at the station."
Later that night, a janitor comes and digs through his things; finding a candy tin that contains Setsuko's ashes. He throws it out, and from there springs the spirits of Setsuko, Seita and a group of fireflies. The implication is that their spirits now haunt the station and that they will now provide the narrative throughout the story. 2ff7e9595c
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