Patreon Letter: 7th October 2019

Hey folks,

Jackson here with the Patreon letter! As you can see from the image, I watched Grave of the Fireflies and, well, the letter was meant to be up yesterday but it was clear no work was getting done after finishing that movie. But I've slept on it, I feel better now, and I'm going to talk a little about my reaction to the movie.

First things first, there's obviously going to be spoilers for the whole movie so if you haven't seen it, you should do that. It's an incredible movie, sorry to jump the gun with that one, but it is. Also! I watched it because I'm trying to keep up with Em and Autumn's Ghibli podcast, And Then An Aeroplane. Their Fireflies episode is right here. I will be listening to it when I finish this letter, and you should too. 

Okay!

All I knew going into Grave of the Fireflies is that it's one of the saddest movies ever made, and also an anti-war movie. Only one of those things is actually true. I came out of the film obviously devestated but also extremely renewed, in terms of how I relate to the world, my politics and my connections with others. 

I do want to note that the film is sparse enough that people will see what they want to see from the tragedy it presents. The tragedy is inherently moving, one of the most crushing things I've ever seen in a film, but it leaves enough space to let the audience fill in the blanks with their own politics. There is a reason that the American reaction to this movie is that it is - generically - about how war is bad. Please ignore who is dropping the bombs. 

And similarly there's a reason that my read on the movie is so focused on the film's potrayal of the breakdown of societal mechanisms, a film about how every person who dies homeless has their own individual tragedy that brought them there, a tragedy built on an infinite points of failure big and small. And at the heart Seita and Setsuko's story is a truth that surprised me, considering the Ghibli movies that I have seen: rugged individualism will not save you, can not save you, from a disaster on a social scale. 

Early on in the movie, directly after the initial, terrifying firebombing of Seita's home, a man says that it's good that everything got destroyed. You'd hate to be the one person with a house left standing. Another gossips that they heard someone's house got two direct hits. The film makes it explicit that community is a scarce resource, and in this wartime crisis everyone has to look out for themselves. Seita's Aunt is initially welcoming, but increasingly treats Seita and Setsuko like the material burdens that, from a certain perspective, they are. She shames them into selling their mother's kimono's for rice, then refuses to share the rice with them. Later in the film after exhausting their own supplies of food and trying to be self sufficent with what they can find in the wild, Seita runs into the city during the bombings and uses the opportunity to steal as much as he can for himself. 

And after Setsuko has died and the war has ended, the very final thing to happen in the film before the final spirit scene is the rich people who own the abandoned shelter they've been living in move back in, overjoyed their mansion remains standing just how they left it, insulated from the horrific consequences of the war. Setsuko leaves in silence with his sisters ashes, to waste his final days away in a train station. 

It is as brutal an ending as I have seen, but it is not directionless and it is not indulgent, nor is it particularly depressing, in the sense of leaving the audience (me) incapable and deflated afterwards. Instead, as Setsuko and Seita's happy spirits watch over the modern Kobe skyline, it reminds us that those that the world has failed do not get to just disappear when they die, and that we have a responsibility to make a better world.

I found this such a surprising and moving approach for a Ghibli film. I'm not well versed in their works, I've seen a couple Miyazaki movies and will be watching along with the podcast, but what I have seen has been a social conservatism about the value of hard work and perserverance in the face of hard times. Kiki's Delivery Service is not a brutal war film, but it does share the similarity of being a film about a child forced into a self sufficent lifestyle, struggling with the economic realities of being an individual keeping yourself afloat. And the conclusion it reaches is that: you just do it, and just doing it is an admirable thing. 

Setsuko and Seita are cut from the same cloth, never complaining of their lot, taking joy in the hard work that makes up their life. They just do it, and they just do it well. And they both end up dead, buried in the shadow of a rich person's home, a corpse ignored as commuters pass by.

The Grave of The Fireflies is a beautiful movie, a new personal favourite of mine, and it has made me excited to watch more Ghibli films and follow along with Em and Autumn on their journey. 

-Jackson