Story (Spoilers!)

The film opens with a shot of a young man dying of starvation in a subway station, his body being prodded and examined by sanitation workers and pedestrians as they pass. Comments about how disgusting the body is are made in passing as his spirit watches over him. This spirit is that of Seito, a teenager, who leaves the subway station to meet his toddling sister Setsuko in a field of fireflies, boarding a train together and vanishing. We then flash back to the events surrounding this. Seito and his sister live in Kobe, which is being constantly barraged by American firebombs: flaming canisters traditionally filled with magnesium, phosphorus, napalm, or thermite. In agonizing detail, we see that these burned the siblings’ mother to death. Seito attempts to hide this from Setsuko, but as we find out later, it is revealed to her by their aunt. In the wake of Kobe’s total destruction, the two move in with their aunt who, when rations decrease, berates them constantly for not working or otherwise disappointing her. They move out, finding refuge in an abandoned bomb shelter surviving on rice. Seito shares a touching moment with Setsuko, gathering fireflies to release in the shelter for light. The next morning, these fireflies are dead and Setsuko shares that she knows her mother is dead as she buries the fireflies. They soon run out of rice, forced to steal food from farmers, for which Seito is severely beaten. Setsuko quickly becomes malnourished, as a doctor states with no intention of helping. Seito withdraws all of the money from his late mother’s bank account to buy Setsuko some food, in the process finding out that his sailor father has also been killed. When he returns with the food, he finds his sister gaunt and hallucinating. He feeds her a piece of watermelon. She thanks him, falling asleep to never wake. He cremates her body and places some of her ashes into the candy tin she carried around. The film flashes forward again to their spirits surrounded by fireflies, sitting together on a bench overlooking modern-day Kobe.

My Review (Very Minor Spoilers)

There is no way to accurately describe the feeling of emptiness that this film conveys, but I will try. Grief does not exist, not for them. Not for those who survived endless nights of relentless slaughter. Early in the film, we see rooms filled with people who have been mutilated by firebombs. Napalm is, along with Agent Orange and landmines, humanity at its most vile. It is impossible to extinguish and, when in contact with human skin, impossible to remove without removing the skin (for example, this is shown in grisly detail in the film We Were Soldiers). We get shots of skinned bodies, skinned earth, and every emotion felt by the families that lived there and lost everything is laid bare as well. We see the bombing, and with a haunting stillness we see the aftermath. Even though we never lived there, we reach a sense of sympathetic paranoia almost immediately, expecting any still moment to suddenly erupt in catastrophic violence. Combining this with being confronted with the characters losing someone close is immensely effective. Director Isao Takahata understood how effective this would be, and further puts us into the minds of these people. Because of this paranoia and this relentless barrage, there is no time to grieve. Any major loss, especially the critical one at the end, is quickly moved past into the next sequence. With surgical precision, Takahata wounds us with a deeply emotional loss, and moves past it. We have to because they had to. There is a death late in the movie that a character responds to with a simple statement, and the movie keeps going. There is no pause. There is no time to be sad. Despite this death being truly and completely soul-rending, we have no time to grieve because we, like those who lived there, have to move on instantly. When food isn’t guaranteed and surviving the night is uncertain at best, there is no time to pause to come to terms with loss. It is a hollowing feeling. The victims of the atrocities of war had no time to cope. They had to pack up and move without attachment, or they were killed.

Symbolism is crucial to this film. Setsuko plays with ants carrying food, but in a more important scene she digs a mass grave for her dead fireflies. With the ants, we recall earlier scenes of people digging up food they buried to save it from bombing. They, without homes and without certainty of survival, pack their food from underground shelter to underground shelter, like ants. As though they have no purpose in life other than to pack food. Their purpose was stripped from them. With the fireflies, and the namesake of the movie, fireflies represent humans on a more emotional level. Humans, for Takahata, are imbued with a light, some spark of life or hope that we carry from childhood through life. For the countless Japanese citizens killed in air raids, their lights were snuffed out and their carcasses tossed into mass graves as though they never had that spark. As though they were just bugs. She respectfully buries them, marking it with a stick, and the grave is disrespected by more affluent children running around to have fun. They are ignorant of the small-scale tragedy and treat it with disrespect, symbolic of the allied powers that remain willfully ignorant, or simply careless of the massive tragedy they caused. As the children run away, we cut to a shot of the siblings, ragged and starving, standing over the grave. They are the fireflies. They are the victims of this.

War is the easiest theme to make movies about. I, admittedly, am a sucker for clever antiwar messages in film. But Grave of the Fireflies isn’t antiwar. It’s reality. It’s not antiwar in the same sense as The Thin Red Line or Princess Mononoke, using real or imagined wars to make a statement about its impact on nature or humanity. Rather, this film serves to depict reality. War is between governments, fundamentally, but real, innocent human beings pay the price. These two children lost everything to war. They weren’t a part of it. They weren’t the ones that bombed Pearl Harbor. Seito was barely alive when the war started, and Setsuko was born during the war. Yet they were the ones who paid the price. This film serves to force us into their lives. We are forced to experience the sorrow they experienced; to feel the fear they felt; to hear an airplane above and instinctively drop to our knees to accept our fate, regardless of whether it’s dropping bombs; to feel two or three major losses as though we were there. But we weren’t. We feel the agony of a select few, but this agony is shared across an entire nation. There are countless Seitos and Setsukos whose stories we will never hear. Therefore we are allowed to move past it and write it into history books, but never truly understand the pain they went through. Japan went through an indescribable human tragedy and this film tells us that we can’t treat it as anything else. The effects of it will live as long as Japan does.

Every single aspect of this film is flawless. Top to bottom, it hurts. It’s as deep as it needs to be to tell an effective story of human loss. We were on the winning side of the war, but we feel this film as though we weren’t. This is an absolutely vital film in every single way, the single greatest war movie I have seen. No it’s not “exciting” or “fun” or anything else we expect from some brainless Hollywood war movie. There is no side to cheer for. This is war. There is no happiness when people are being slaughtered. There is no cheering for victory when it comes as a result of an insurmountable tragedy. No matter where you live, no matter what gets your country into a war, no matter what, you are not the good guy. There is no good guy in war; there are only sides whose crimes are unequal. There is only loss. This film shows that.

For some clarity on my ratings, over the last three or four years I have watched and rated 1,124 movies as of today. I don’t give out high scores freely. It takes a lot to make me fork over a 9; and flawless technical and philosophical precision, something truly monumental, to make me give out a 10. I see it as a mark of being a masterpiece, and there have been so few of them across history. Some examples would be 2001, Persona, Dekalog, or Solaris. I seek them out in every film class I take, as well as my own viewing, so there is always a chance I will give one out in a class but it isn’t likely. Therefore out of that 1,124, I have given 16 perfect scores.

This is one of them.

10/10

My Review (Spoilers, but the book is 700 years old, so)

This film is based on the 2010 game rather than the book, but they follow around the same plot. And as I just noted, it is seven hundred years old so I will be keeping the plot relatively brief, but elaborating on the differences. I think it’s anime, but I’m not sure. I found it under the anime tab on a streaming service I use but I don’t know how accurate it is.

The film opens with Dante traversing the dark forest. Unlike the book, Dante is a returning crusader looking for his fiancee Beatrice. He returns home to find his family slaughtered and Beatrice on her deathbed, stating that a foreigner killed them all. She dies, and as she ascends to heaven she is taken by Lucifer’s shadow into Hell, as an oath between them had been broken. Dante chases them to the door of the underworld, and is met by serpents who sew images of his sins onto him in the shape of a crucifix, and by the spirit of Virgil who tells him to pray for it to open. It opens for him and he descends into Hell, riding Charon into Limbo before killing him and taking a demon’s axe as his own. He and Virgil wander through Limbo, finding the soul of his dead child, had in secret by Beatrice out of wedlock. The duo encounters King Minos, who sentences souls to a circle of Hell, but Dante kills him. Venturing into the second circle, they find succubi and Dante happens upon the realization that he slept with another woman, who was trying to save her husband from being beaten to death. This was the vow that was broken. The two find a grotto of gluttons being eaten by Cerberus, and Virgil tells Dante to enter Cerberus to get to the next circle. He does, and then kills Cerberus, sending him into the next circle: greed. There, he finds his violently greedy and gluttonous father, who had been promised a thousand years free of punishment and a mountain of gold in exchange for killing his son. So Dante kills him. They descend into the fifth circle, and ride Phlegyas into the City of Dis. He chases Lucifer and Beatrice into the sixth circle where he finds Farinata, a man he hated for years. He taunts him with Satan’s intent to marry Beatrice, so naturally Dante kills him. The force of the death of Christ, which just happened on the surface, crumbles the sixth circle and Dante flees to the seventh. A minotaur blocks his path, but he kills it. They enter the forest of suicides where Dante finds his mother who killed herself out of shame for not being strong enough to stand up to her husband. Dante uses Beatrice’s cross to free her. Beatrice’s brother stops Dante, having been sent to the circle of Violence for committing evil deeds in the name of God, and Dante kills him and then proceeds to pray for his forgiveness. Dante enters the eighth circle alone, and finds Beatrice and Lucifer married. Beatrice attacks him for being a fraud (eighth circle sin) and beats him to a pulp. We realize that his entire family was killed by the husband of the woman he had adulterous sex with. Kinky. He frees Beatrice with her own cross and descends into the ninth circle. Dante immediately murders Lucifer, which actually freed his real body, as Beatrice was bait to lure a powerful warrior into Hell to free him. Lucifer beats Dante to a pulp and begins to descend into Purgatory, but Dante prays for help and divine light emanates from his sin crucifix, freezing Lucifer. Dante jumps into the Purgatory portal, rips off that sin crucifix, and shacks up with Beatrice comfortably between life and death.

My Review

Okay, so let me preface this with the fact that Dante’s Inferno is one of my favorite books of all time. In fact, I have a portion of it tattooed down my sternum. So I had a good handful of preconceived notions about this going into it. But I was pleasantly surprised by this film. I thought the deviations from the plot of the original novel were a nice touch, with an actual focus on Dante conquering his sins while he goes through Hell rather than sightseeing on his way to Heaven and Beatrice. Granted, this is the plot of Dante’s Purgatorio but it was nice to see the makers of the game/movie combine the two themes. I was relatively intrigued by the above-ground subplot happening and I was drawn in by the marriage of Beatrice and Lucifer. I though that him murdering a new creature at the end of each circle of hell was a reference to him overcoming his unbelievably huge list of sins, and I liked that. The art would change after each circle, signifying his change as a person, and that was neat. That being said, there was nothing that really stood out about the film. It was very clearly based on the plot of the game, which I don’t have any inherent issue with when done appropriately, which it was. My biggest issue with the film is that it stagnates very early on. It reaches a peak level of excitement very quickly with the Charon fight, and never reaches a higher level than that. On the whole, it was okay. It was an interesting watch, but I would recommend people play the game instead, as the pacing in it seems to make more sense dramatically than it does here. But if you like Inferno, this hour and 20 minutes isn’t badly spent, and the hybrid of the first and second portions of the Divine Comedy is interesting to see.

5/10

If you want other movies based on Dante, there is a 1911 Italian film that’s on YouTube. Also, Stan Brakhage made a hand-painted short film inspired by it, but good luck digging any meaning out of him. Last but not least, please refer to Holy Motors, by Leos Carax. I won’t spoil it, but it compares acting and movie making to Inferno through the main character’s adventure in the film, and it is quite good. It’s weird, but it’s fun.

Story (Spoilers!)

This film opens with a bank robber, Gasback, being thwarted by his traitorous sidekicks and a man named Vash, causing him to use incendiary devices on parts of the town, including its power plant. Twenty years pass and the sidekick had used his money to rebuild the plant and become mayor. He has insured his giant bronze statue and fears, rightfully, that Gasback will try to steal it, and gathers bounty hunters to kill Gasback for his $300 million bounty. Among these are Amelia (a new character), Vash, Milly Thompson, and Meryl Stryfe. While Gasback is playing poker, he is attacked by the police and protected by Wolfwood, who owes him for saving his life in a desert. Vash continues creeping on Amelia, going with her to a bar and meeting Milly and Meryl before a fight breaks out. No worries, Vash the pacifist steals everyone’s bullets. Gasback comes to town the next morning and everyone tries to kill him, but he manages to break into the mayor’s house and threaten him. Again thwarted by Vash, he finds the mayor elsewhere and steals everything he has to make up for the robbery 20 years prior, including the power plant. He escapes with it and Vash is shot in the ensuing chase. Thinking Vash is dead, Amelia and Wolfwood hunt Gasback down and Deus Ex Vash saves the day, bringing down Gasback. Amelia, revealing that she is Gasback’s daughter, chooses not to kill him, inspired by Vash. Turns out, if Vash hadn’t spared Gasback during the robbery, Amelia wouldn’t have been born. Fun.

My Review

Apologies for not posting recently, I had been working on my 25-page capstone (I was only allowed to move forward with my outline literally two weeks ago ffs) and a mountain of other such stumbling blocks. That aside, I am trying to catch up so I’ll be pumping out some regrettable decisions. One of these regrettable decisions was watching this film, a poorly-paced sequel to a show that I have not seen, starring a character that I hate. Although having seen this, I will assume that all I’m missing is how characters know each other and their motivations.

First of all, this film is fun. It’s thoughtless and weak, but it’s fun. In terms of the bare bones of a film, a standard plot structure is all that is to be found. I cannot attest to the characters before this film, but the only one with any sort of development was Amelia, whose character arc works well. Her motivations for changing were flat out stupid, but at least these events brought about a change of heart that was thematically appropriate and integral to the plot. The voice acting is standard, the writing is pretty poor, but I have come to expect this from whatever scrapings I pull up from the bottom of the barrel on a free streaming service.

Literally nothing about this film is of note. I will forget everything about it within the day, and I cannot recommend this less unless you have seen the show already, or you are mildly inebriated and want to watch something fun. And even then you’re likely to be disappointed. I genuinely hated every second of watching this. It doesn’t have enough egregious structural offenses to be bad, but nothing truly noteworthy either. It just exists. You could certainly do better with your time.

5/10

Also, apologies for the insubstantial review. But this is the most painfully mediocre movie I have seen in years, and as such there is nothing to talk about for it. Again, don’t waste your time. There are good action movies, and there are bad action movies. Both would be more entertaining than this.

Featured image is what’s keeping me going. It’s what’s keeping us all going. Walk your walk, two-legged cats.

Story (Spoilers!)

Ponyo opens on a man named Fujimoto doing science things with his daughter, Brunhilde and her younger sisters. Brunhilde hitches a ride on a jellyfish and is subsequently brought to shore in a bottle, which is found by Sosuke, a five-year-old boy. He breaks the bottle, cutting his thumb, and the newly-named Ponyo licks the blood, healing his wound. Fujimoto does not like this and recalls her to the sea. While in his submarine, she begins to force herself to evolve into a human, which Fujimoto dislikes due to his hatred of humans ruining the sea. He is unable to restrain her, so he cracks open a cold one without any of the boys, and Popeye’s her back into fish form. Fujimoto leaves to confront her mother, Cate Blanchett (who assumes her true form as a goddess), and she escapes, inadvertently drawing the moon way too close to the earth and flooding the planet, except for Sosuke’s mountaintop home. Ponyo, now human, is allowed to live with Sosuke and his mother deems it necessary to check on the old people she takes care of. This imbalance, Cate Blanchett says, can be resolved if Sosuke can pass a test. If not, she will turn into sea foam, as in the original version of The Little Mermaid, upon which this is based. Ponyo and Sosuke search for his mother until Ponyo’s magic runs out and she regresses to fish form. When this happens, Fujimoto takes them underwater to the old folks’ home and Cate Blanchett makes Sosuke prove that he will love Ponyo whether she is fish or human. He agrees, so Fujimoto takes them to the surface. Ponyo leaps out of her bowl, kisses Sosuke, turns into a human, and we roll credits.

My Review (Minor Spoilers)

The bulk of this film centers on unconditional love and the need for parents to accept that their children will grow up eventually. Fujimoto fears for Ponyo’s life above sea due to his observance that humans are dangerously stupid and loveless, especially for the environment. His fears are calmed, however, when Cate Blanchett makes him realize that Ponyo is growing up and should make her own conscious decisions based on love. As we have seen from the beginning of the film, she and Sosuke love each other, and she should be free to pursue that. So to that extent, love for each other is central to this film, and the theme that love of one’s child necessitates that they be free to choose is also central to it.

That said, this film is made for the main character’s demographic: five-year-olds. Thematically and visually, this film is both a wholly original take on The Little Mermaid and beautifully executed; however, this is one of the first times in my Miyazaki experience where it was made obvious that that man, that god, that absolute unit, does not work with a script. He allows his films, like Ponyo herself, to grow naturally out of his storyboarding into the final product that “it” wants to be rather than writing a script first. Sometimes that pays off for me personally, like My Neighbor Totoro, and sometimes it really doesn’t. I feel ambivalent toward this film. I don’t hate it, but it is undoubtedly my least favorite I have seen from him.

Despite this, I am not a five-year-old, nor did I see it when I was. I also don’t have children to apply the theme of this movie to. I don’t have a childhood attachment to this film, but I fully understand why some do. I wish I saw it as a kid because for what it is, a fundamentally children’s film, it is quite good. But as a 20-year-old, I feel nothing toward it. But I don’t base my scores on whether I like the film. That’s what my understanding of film language is for.

7/10

Story (Spoilers!)

This film centers on Jiro Horikoshi, who has long aspired to fly or design airplanes. As he is nearsighted, he is unable to do the former and is inspired by an engineer in his dreams, Giovanni Caproni, to do the latter. His desire to make beautiful planes brings him to college five years later, on the way meeting a wealthy woman named Naoko Satomi as the Great Kanto Earthquake halts their train. Four years after that, Jiro has graduated college and begins work as an aeronautical engineer for Mitsubishi, designing an airplane that fails during testing. Disillusioned, Jiro and his friend are sent to Germany to study Hugo Junkers’ work. Three years later, Jiro is promoted to chief designer where he designs a plane that also fails testing. He takes a mental vacation where he encounters Naoko, now an artist, again and becomes engaged to her. He also meets a secretly anti-Nazi German man named Castorp, who is wanted by the secret police, and Jiro by extension. He hides out while working on a new project, and Naoko suffers a lung hemorrhage due to her tuberculosis and has to in a sanatorium. She leaves to marry Jiro despite her health, and Jiro’s sister advises him that tuberculosis is incurable and their marriage will end in her death. Jiro has to leave her side to attend the test flight of his newest design, causing her to return to the sanatorium and leave letters for him. During the successful test, he has a feeling that Naoko has died, shown through a sudden silence. After the war has ended, he sees the devastation around him and feels immense regret that his designs were used for war rather than beauty. He sees his planes fly by, saluting him, and Caproni comforts him by saying that even though they were used for violence, his dream of making beautiful planes was realized. Naoko’s spirit also comes to him asking him that he live a full life.

My Review (Spoilers)

Lamenting over the corruption of beauty is the essence of this film, embodied both by Jiro’s work on Zeroes and Naoko’s health decline. Jiro is a prodigy in airplane design, in one scene looking over the blueprints and instantly finding a way to make his plane a pound lighter. Jiro sees Naoko for the first time as an adult as she is atop a hill painting a nearly abstract vision of her landscape. When she has a lung hemorrhage as a result of her TB, she violently coughs blood onto her work in progress. As Jiro looks over the devastation after the war, this is his moment of realizing his soiled art. Both Naoko and Jiro’s masterpieces were stained by blood, ruining them. While Naoko isn’t shown lamenting over her loss, Jiro’s pain is palpable, echoing a deep regret for the losses that he has indirectly caused.

Similarly to our discussion of Castle in the Sky, flying is obviously quite important to this film symbolically. The former, as with most Ghibli films, uses gliders to simulate humans and nature coexisting to push humanity higher, both metaphysically and literally. In that film, the two main characters affix themselves to a glider atop their plane and release it, flying higher into the air, symbolic of humanity bettering itself by combining technology and nature rather than only using technology at the expense or ignorance of nature. In this film, however, flying is shown as a means of escape for Jiro, and as an allegory for his dreams. Jiro is virtually blind without his inch-thick glasses, so his dreams of flying are exchanged for vicariously living through those that fly his creations. In his dreams, he meets a visionary who builds planes for purely aesthetic reasons rather than any semblance of logic or reason, as they crash and burn upon takeoff every time. Jiro sees himself and his work through this lens as well, with his own planes in his dreams ascending high into the air and breaking due to some minor flaw. Fueled by a childhood obsession with the ability to fly and stunted by his inability to do so himself, he becomes wholly fixated on making a perfect flying machine. This makes him a perfectionist visionary, a combination that can do literally nothing but cause degenerative mental illness, echoed by Naoko’s degenerative physical illness. And while Naoko succumbs to her illness, Jiro uses his to make one of the most perfect flying machines in history. This makes its fall from grace all the more poignant for the audience, as we have seen him spend his entire life in a search for beauty, and then to succeed and have this beauty soiled by blood. In this sense, the lovers’ stories mirror each other, and concludes with Naoko’s spirit urging Jiro to do what she couldn’t: beat his illness and continue to make art.

Structurally, this film is virtually flawless. At times the pacing fell flat, it introduced some under-developed characters, but as a pseudo-biopic it would be foolish of me to expect anything else. Not all humans have developed personalities, you know. The only gripes that I have with this thing are minor inconveniences with plot development, but that’s nothing that cripples the movie. It’s relatively light thematically, but the themes that it does attempt at are pulled off quite well. I would’ve liked to have seen more depth to it, but it didn’t need to be deep. As a movie, this is great. Undeniably one of the best Ghibli movies out, though not nearly my favorite.

I hate giving so many good scores for this class, as I generally don’t give good scores, but Ghibli has proven itself to never really disappoint (I will not be watching Tales from Earthsea anytime soon out of fear). This film is a masterclass in how to make a biopic. It sticks to reality and uses expressionism to flesh out internal emotions, while dramatizing just enough to further those emotions and the themes it presents. And on top of that, these themes are handled better than most films I have seen. It takes a little more than a surface-level viewing to get them, but they aren’t terribly difficult to suss out.

9/10