Grave of the Fireflies
August 18, 2015
Jesus Christ, fuck this movie. It’s not a children’s film. This is definitely one of the most cynical movies I’ve ever seen. A knife stab of a movie. They are going to portray this innocent and sweet sibling relationship, set it up so that it’s the most wonderful and altruistic relationship seen only in fairytales. They’re then going to take the pair and throw all of life’s horrors at them.
War is bad because people are bad, because life is bad, because everything is fucked. People are stupid, mean, and indifferent. See that metaphor for all of life’s beauties, the kind of all-encompassing warmth of unconditional love, now watch it die, slowly and painfully.
I wonder what someone who’s survived that period in Japan thought of this movie. I think there’s two camps:
“A realistic movie about the hardships after losing a war, glad they didn’t fluff it up”
“A realistic movie about the hardships after losing a war, this brings up bad memories, disappointed we still can’t move on from this”
The last montage after Setsuko dies...it’s hard to describe just how fucking sad that was. I wanted to die. It was pouring salt into the wound.
Conclusion:
All that sad shit that people say I like, it really isn’t sad at all, it’s ultimately life-affirming. Now this movie is actually sad.
Things like hospice, david foster wallace, or docudramas like american movie or crumb. Even italian neorealism like bicycle thieves.There’s a beautiful sadness to them, a redemptive quality, losing in a glorious way. An outsider looking in. Living. Surviving.
I don’t think this movie had it. It was beautifully made, and incredibly sad...But it’s a dark sadness, not a cathartic one.
It’s a downward curve of tragedy, starting high, somewhat bright, ending at the bottom, where it’s completely dark. A fairytale turned grotesque, while still retaining the surface image of a fairytale.
Redemptive sadness starts at the bottom, and ends at the bottom. Along the way we realize the bottom is all there really is, and that’s fine.
I wasn’t in a mood to see that movie, it was too depressing for me.