Forum - View topicOnline critic / satirist offers different perspective on Grave of the Fireflies.
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Ggultra2764
 Subscriber Posts: 3872 Location: New York state. |
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I thought this would be something worth discussion about since I can't seem to find anyone else online offering up the idea behind Grave of the Fireflies' themes. However, do be warned that the critic expressing his thoughts in this video clip are critical towards the movie so don't take things too personally as he does offer up reasonable claims as to why he can't bring himself to enjoy the film instead of trying to intentionally troll fans of his online show.
And it is someone that JesuOtaku would know rather well from his occasional appearances in her anime reviews! To those not familiar with Bennett the Sage, he is a member of the That Guy with the Glasses site who often does satirical reviews to video games and older anime titles. For his recent anime review, he did an episode for Grave of the Fireflies where he ditches the usual satire of his anime reviews and offers up his personal thoughts of the anime where he is critical of it and interprets the message of the movie as something entirely different and possibly controversial because of the movie's director, Isao Takahata, and real-life concerns with the Japanese youth population during the time period in which the film was made. Does anyone agree with this interpretation to Grave of the Fireflies and Sage's criticisms of the film? |
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AmpersandsUnited
Posts: 633 |
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More accurate title "Random guy on the internet rants about anime movies because he saw AVGN/NC do it"
The minute he said he wanted people to send him hate comments (i.e views i.e. ad revenue from hits) he gave away his intentions. But most importantly, it's a movie aimed squarely at the Japanese about Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors, not at white teenagers in the year 2012. The idea he calls the accurate portrayal of how awful dropping the bomb was "deceptive" and "underhanded" while he sits in his arm chair halfway across the world in another time period is pretty offensive, then again, that was his intention. |
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Tris8
 Posts: 2114 Location: Where the rain is. |
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Hm. That is certainly an interesting interpretation, and I agree with some of it. Seita and Setsuko do seem like constructs to me, but is that really a bad thing? I doubt many have seen or heard of the 1940 movie Rebecca, but that movie contains a perfect example of an effectively used construct of a character. A young, innocent and good-natured woman marries a rich widower. She is the epitome of a 'perfect wife'; beautiful, young, adores her husband, undemanding, and dependent. I didn't realize it the first watch through, but this woman (arguably the main character), doesn't even have a name. It's not her that matters, it is what she represents. And in a case like this, it doesn't matter that she is 1 dimensional. I think of Grave of the Fireflies in the same way. I did care about Seita and Setsuko, but as the reviewer said you could have replaced them with just about any set of children and it wouldn't have matter. And for me, therein lies the power of the film. By keeping them as constructs, the message I received was that the film wasn't about Seita and Setsuko dying, it was about hundreds of children dying, and these two were just a representation of the suffering they had all gone through.
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ailblentyn
 Posts: 1688 Location: body in Ohio, heart in Sydney |
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Not that obscure, surely! |
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Tris8
Posts: 2114 Location: Where the rain is. |
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 And no one is really interested either until I mention Alfred Hitchcock.....  But maybe that's because my friends are pretty young (teens and early 20s).
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zawa113
 Posts: 7357 |
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Oho, I'd been waiting to see what Sage would say about this movie since he announced he'd review it last week. Glad he is going in for another terrible short OVA next week though.
So, with what can best be described as "not a secret", it is very obvious that no one on the forums probably hates this movie more than I do, and I think Sage hit a lot of the reasons why I hate it so much. Namely, manipulation and characters. I don't appreciate obvious and forced manipulation. If it can be done without me noticing, so be it, it means it was done very well. But even somewhat early into my fandom I still detected that all this padding was useless. And for me personally, just not very enjoyable (though that I could call more subjective). Then what really hit the nail on the head was the "suck up your pride and go back with your aunt" thing immediately dismissed, it made me go "seriously?" and I'm glad that it annoyed Sage just as much and that he brought attention to it. And of course it also didn't help that I didn't like the characters. I can understand that making them generic meant it could apply to a lot of siblings, but I didn't enjoy watching them do nothing but play the entire time then whine about having to maybe do some work during a time of war in order to survive. It's why I don't feel sorry when the grasshopper dies at the end of The Ant and the Grasshopper (and get offended at kiddified versions that have the ants welcome in that stupid moocher), actually this movie does kinda remind me of that story come to think of it. In a world that obviously had no silver platter, it made me frankly disgusted to see the boy complain about a lack of one, it absolutely disconnected me from his character. He was the grasshopper expecting to just have everything work out despite not putting in an effort and just playing. And seeing the grasshopper acting self-entitled after all of it? Eww. It resulted in the movie becoming physically painful for me to watch because I hated the boy so damn much, it's one thing to make an ugly and flawed character (frankly I love flawed characters, more interesting). It's another to make one so delusional that he thinks he's that self-entitled in a time of war and actually gets mad at the ants for trying to survive. Then to make him the protagonist and expect me to sympathize with him? Not happening. Perhaps that is what I found to be the greatest flaw in the movie. And the fact that all the fluff revolves around this character? I think it's easy to see why people who hate the main boy would hate the movie, if it didn't bother you, ok, but it sure bothered the hell out of me. Maybe other kids weren't as annoyed by the grasshopper when they were children, but I remembered reading that story in first grade and being annoyed with the Disney ending they gave us in first grade. I'm hoping my Ant and the Grasshopper thing made sense right now, it did to me I suppose? So, as someone who hates this movie and hasn't shut up about hating this movie for years, and I am going to try and not go very far into what could be another very long rant from me (I held back up there by a ton), I think Sage's review can possibly help people who adore the movie understand why others hate it so much. I still think it's a shame that anyone who hates the movie is automatically labeled a troll when, as Sage points out, there legitimate reasons to, at the very least, not like this movie. It just probably happened that some of the things Sage said he hated simply pissed me off more. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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On my first trip through the film, I felt a little sad at the way the younger sister was being forced around by her idiot brother, but his stubborn pride and selfishness didn't settle in until I was done and chatted with my friends a little. I understand it's a personal memoir of a the boy's life during the film and it's his way of asking for forgiveness for what he did, but does that not make anger some filmgoers feel towards this narrative any less genuine? No, and I don't think I feel like I have any passion for revisiting Grave anytime soon because of it. Even if characters that make you feel some intense emotion instead of boredom are good characters, in a sense, I don't want to see him again. Are we supposed to be angry at him because of caused to happen to his sister? Is he actually the antagonist of the story in some way, and she the protagonist?
It's hard not to recommend films like these because of their subject matter, everyone loves seeing kids suffering in wartime, but not when it's their own damn fault. |
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15457 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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He had some good points, I can agree with some of his points, but I guess I do not agree with overall for the same reason I dislike a lot of the "proper" anime reviewers (or in general movie reviewers on the internet), way to cynicle. He was at least polite enough to seem reasonable, perhaps there was intent originally to teens listen to their parents, but art is not only about what the artist put in, but what audience takes out. When I watched the film I got rather attached to the characters, and yes they are generic, but that only gives the feeling that almost anyone could fall into the situation, and I can't see that as a bad thing.
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ailblentyn
Posts: 1688 Location: body in Ohio, heart in Sydney |
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@classicalzawa
I can't help wondering do you have the same reaction to Shakespearean tragedy? That you don't care about the hero of Othello because he's a gullible idiot? That Macbeth is uninvolving as tragedy because the main character's ambition brings it on himself? I think Seita's tragic situation is that he's a child, old enough to kid himself that he's capable of taking care of things but with actually no resources to do so. They leave the aunt because they need love. I think. |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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Actually, I do feel that way about Romeo and Juliet, at least. I hated that they only knew each other for two or maybe three days and become so engrossed, so in love, that they decide to kill themselves over it. It comes off as petty teen rebellion to me. I hate that play. I do like when characters who bring it upon themselves get what they deserve, hopefully only involving themselves. |
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Errinundra
Moderator
 Posts: 6523 Location: Melbourne, Oz |
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I'm another that doesn't gush over Grave of the Fireflies. To me the emotional manipulation is as blatant as anything in Clannad or Clannad After Story. Just because it has a "serious" setting (World War 2) doesn't make it any more worthy.
The most egregious scene for me is when the spoiler[ghost of] Setsuko plays outside their bunker. This scene adds nothing to the message of the movie or to development of Setsuko as a character nor does it advance the plot in any way. It is simply fanservice or, to put it more bluntly - emotion porn. To me it is on the same level as spoiler[Ushio struggling in the snow in Clannad After Story even though she's dying]. It has one purpose and one purpose only: to make the viewer cry. Crying in movies is not a fault in itself if it's reinforcing something else, but on its own it's easy manipulation. In this instance it detracts from the interesting way that Seito's arrogance and stubborness is an allegory for Japanese imperialism and bloodymindedness in the face of inevitable defeat. |
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zawa113
Posts: 7357 |
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@aiblentyn
....You're probably going to have to use another example. I can't understand Shakespearean English worth a damn in the least, so I've honestly never read one of his plays (except R&J, which, like many of us, was forced upon me in high school, not that I ever really understood what was happening), nor have I seen any or really have any plans to. Really not sure what Othello or Macbeth are really about. From what I understood about R&J though, it's about two teens who were in such a rush to elope that they didn't bother even thinking through their own deaths at the end and acted in just as rushed a manner as Seita did upon leaving his aunt's house. Seriously, doesn't Run Lola Run take place over more time than R&J? (ok not really since RLR takes place over the same 20 minutes, but at least Lola and Manni had a more established relationship than R&J ever did). I have a hard time taking R&J seriously to be honest. Which is weird because tragic romance anime like Sea Prince and the Fire Child or Basilisk? Love them, it's just the original I don't like. So yeah, you can use an idea and simply do it better or worse than something else with the same one. So anyway I'm guessing you're asking if I think characters can be stupid enough to bring tragedy upon themselves and have it still turn out to be an engaging story? Well, Death Note, Light Yagami certainly had his fatal flaw of extreme pride, but damn if that wasn't an interesting series. Maybe part of it is that we saw a lot of his thought processes and slowly saw him change from ordinary high schooler to full on god-complex insane person, in other words, he was an actually interesting character. Not only that, but I, and a lot of other people, can't quite bring ourselves to actually hate him. Maybe it's because he was ambitious to actually do something worthy, unlike Seita. Or maybe it's that he has more of a personality than a piece of cardboard and you can't just swap him out with another random high schooler from his school. I think it's both perfectly realistic to expect flawed characters (perfect ones are boring imo) and it's also possible to pull them off, but not everything that tries it is going to pull it off correctly. That said, there are certain character flaws I dislike more than others, selfishness being one of them (perhaps because I hate it so much irl, having way too many selfish jerks in my family). At this point though, I'm practically used to being demonized for not liking GotFF. It's like GotFF is a holy cow of anime movies and how dare I diss it, like it's somehow immune from any critical look at it and anyone who dare does is immediately branded evil. Seriously, I think you're allowed to criticize Citizen Kane (a movie I have no actually seen and thus will not criticize myself) more and get away with it. Though I am glad to see others who just don't care for GotFF. |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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Any film is able to picked apart when looking at its construction and elements in a thoughtful manner. Kane has a weird story structure that depicts, satirizes, and often elevates a fictional version of the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst from childhood to death, all in an attempt to piece together his life and what "Rosebud" meant. It's an incredible film, mostly through of Orson Welles' acting, his direction and cinematography, the set design, and overall editing, but the driving plot is often lost and Charles Foster Kane is mostly unlikeable as a "protagonist". It comes off more as a cinematic puzzle than a piece of entertaining film, which is why people like to analyze it and talk about it to this day. It's easier to break that film into the individual segments and talk about what's currently going on in Kane's life through his interactions and the way the scenes are shot. I recommend it just to see what it's about, for what it did in film that seems out of time in 1940. If you want to really talk about Sacred Cows, bring up Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, or Casablanca. I'd welcome true open criticism of Citizen Kane, because it can only help to further understand the picture. Whereas the others are easier to grasp without any kind of real discourse. |
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jl07045
 Posts: 1527 Location: Riga, Latvia |
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I'll agree that the movie was a tad too semtimental in the end, but there is something that needs to be said. People are not characters and life does not have a plot. We may hate Seito and we may question Takahata's agenda, but what that movie shows is two innocents dying, because war sucks and because people suck. A simple truth that this movie delivers in spades. And that makes me sad with or without ghosts.
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EireformContinent
 Posts: 977 Location: Łódź/Poland (The Promised Land) |
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[Running out from the closet- I'm not alone!]
Yes, we know that people are killed during the war and that's terrible, but there are ways to show it without making people wonder it it's not their own fault. Living in country that was literally shattered during WWII I've grown up knowing the accounts of those who survived two offensives, air-raids, pacification and starvation. During wartime children grow up quickly and can understand that psychical survival is a better strategy than keeping your noose too high. And even among those involved in military was a simple rule: risk your own life. If you think you will feed yourself with own pride, do it yourself. Don't involve those depended on you, because I it would be better for that girl to be alive with nasty aunt than die in arms of soooo loving brother. |
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