Animated short with gay japanese men fighting to the death

So, I have finally seen Grave of the Fireflies! And watched Totoro for the For comments before the film, see Animation Night Anyway, what a fascinating range that was. I went into Fireflies not know much more than the premise - two children die in the war - and to expect an extremely sad movie.

So, let me talk about some things that stood out to me, compared to that expectation. It does use music, but only sometimes. In contrast to the exaggerated emotions and stretchy faces of Totorocharacters are mostly quite stoic. Grave of the Fireflies opens with the death of the boy Seita.

He is one of a number of starving, listless children in what I think is a train station. Even before his death, he barely responds to interaction or offers of food, and before long he dies. A uniformed man finds his body, but does not seem to find it remarkable - children dying here is a regular occurrence.

The film is based on a short story written in by Akiyuki Nosaka. It is semi-autobiograpical; in reality, Nosaka lost three family members during the war: one sister to illness, his father to the firebombing of Kobe, and then his younger sister Fukui to malnutrition; the story is framed as an apology to Fukui for her death.

Takahata was born in Octoberso he would have been nine, approaching ten years old when the war ended. He had also survived a US air raid, on Okayama in June 29, but it seems he did not lose family to the war.

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So, by the time of Grave of the Fireflies being released, Takahata was already 53 years old. There are two other obvious films to compare this one to - both dealing with children living through the war, and the time afterwards. You can read it here on archive. In the introduction, Nakazawa writes that many of the awful scenes in the story are directly autobiographical; he says:.

Barefoot Gen was adapted to two anime films by Madhouse in and ; at the time the mighty Osamu Dezaki had just departed inand so under Masao Maroyama, Madhouse was becoming much more auteur-driven studio with an increasingly diverse output with figures like Rintaro coming into their own.

Despite the harsh circumstances, most of the early parts of the film end with the characters laughing and a fade to black. When it comes to the Hiroshima bombing Barefoot Gen does not at all hold back on detail; it is not exactly realism but it clearly draws heavily on nuclear bomb test footage.

Then, we see the bombing through the scope of the plane; the pilots are drawn in a heavily hatched style with realistic proportions reminiscent of an American comic. The bomb drops, and the mushroom cloud rises silently as an expanding circle; then we see a series of shots abruptly switch into harsh black and white shadow shapes.

Like in Grave of the Firefliesthey are using the techniques of cel shading to show form through shape, but with the contrast pushed up to maximum. In the 80s OVA era, Madhouse would become experts at drawing monsters, but Gen actually predates most of these well-known works.

Nevertheless, it delivers a huge amount of grotesque imagery: a chain of shots showing characters we have grown to like over the course of the film being melted away, their eyeballs falling out, etc. All of these scenes are shown in vivid, hypersaturated colours against a swirling paint background.

Following this the rest of the film is a series of further horrors as Gen loses his family trapped in a burning building an event directly experienced by Nakazawa and stumbles alone through the city, witnessing the injuries of survivors who stumble out of the ruins like zombiesand then the effects of radiation poisoning.

It is a harrowing film; it never looks away.