Films > Film Reviews

Grave of the Fireflies

27/05/16

The debut feature for director and long time Miyazaki-collaborator Isao Takahata - who would go on to make the lesser-known Only Yesterday, Pom Poko and The Tale of Princess Kaguya - Grave of the Fireflies follows two orphaned children as they struggle to survive in the final months of WWII Japan.

The animation might not be as well-developed as the studio's later work (like the Oscar-winning Spirited Away), but the characters are some of the most enduring. It has been universally crowned the saddest of all Studio Ghibli films. 

 Released in 1988, Grave of the Fireflies was shown as a double bill with My Neighbour Totoro (a film so recognisably cute that its furry troll has become Ghibli's official mascot), which seems like a devastating combination, doesn't it? There though are similarities: absent mothers, a relocation to a countryside of rice paddies, a fascination with a nature unscarred by war.

Roger Ebert talks about the moments of stillness in Ghibli films, the beats between the action that focus on details usually ignored by American animation, and Grave of the Fireflies is full of it: pots in the rain, a boy drinking from a hosepipe, insects in the grass. It's a very quiet film about a loud period in history: an unnoticed, small-scale tragedy in the face of global conflict. The film's motif of the firefly - the children let them into their shelter at night, and by morning they have all suffocated, their lights burned out - is a delicate mirroring of the characters' own situation. As with all Ghiblis, there is a wonderful quality of magic and innocence, even when loss and hardship threaten to take control.

This is the third film in Cinema City's 'Studio Ghibli Forever' season, which coincides with the English language release of perhaps the last Ghibli ever, When Marnie Was There.