Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
Directed by Isao Takahata
In the final months of World War II, 14-year-old Seita and his sister Setsuko are orphaned when their mother is killed during an air raid in Kobe, Japan. After a falling out with their aunt, they move into an abandoned bomb shelter. With no surviving relatives and their emergency rations depleted, Seita and Setsuko struggle to survive.
19 connections found
View:
19 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Grave of the Fireflies to
As is, it's something more akin to Studio Ghibli's own Grave of the Fireflies in its humanizing of a man whose dreams were corrupted into something terrible.
Seriously, as feeling more conscious of its overlooked dark side, now I wonder whether my viewing of this film could have been improved by a double feature show with other Japanese animation " Grave of the Fireflies " (1988).
Yet just as with Isao Takahata’s “Grave of the Fireflies,” about two children surviving amid the terrors of World War II, it would be hard to argue that the subject of Mr. Miyazaki’s film was cavalierly seized upon.
With the help of Ghibli’s artists and technicians—supervised by Grave Of The Fireflies / The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya director Isao Takahata— The Red Turtle is both minimalist and vividly rendered, from the computer-animated waves to the well-articulated hand-drawn human figures.
The Red Turtle is a collaboration between the Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit, who won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2001 with Father and Daughter, and the revered Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, whose 80-year-old co-founder Isao Takahata (1988's Grave of the Fireflies) is credited as the movie's "artistic producer".
As he related in an interview at Cannes, the animator got an out-of-the-blue message from Studio Ghibli co-founder and legendary Japanese director Isao Takahata (“The Tale of Princess Kaguya,” “Grave of the Fireflies”) offering him the chance to be the first non-Japanese animator to make a film for the revered studio.
With the help of Studio Ghibli (who counts this film as their first care of a non-Japanese filmmaker) and Grave of the Fireflies director Isao Takahata, writer-director Michaël Dudok de Wit has spent the past ten years crafting something of a pure animated film—“essential” cinema in that it’s boiled down to its essentials.
Ghibli co-founder and director Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies) helped Dudok de Wit expand his vision into a feature-length work, and his appreciation for eloquent details can be seen in the final product — though Dudok de Wit makes sure to clarify that neither he nor Takahata were emulating the look and feel of other Ghibli productions with The Red Turtle.
As is, it's something more akin to Studio Ghibli's own Grave of the Fireflies in its humanizing of a man whose dreams were corrupted into something terrible.
I'd argue that stuff like Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies or even Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima does a fair to excellent job at it, but Truffaut has a point.
Advertisement
Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies is a timeless example; it’s hard to imagine the story of two young children slowly starving in the war-torn Japanese countryside told through the human bodies of young actors.
The film does feel startlingly personal, and much like the great Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Pixar’s Up (2009) before it, Kubo and the Two Strings treats its audience with utmost respect, taking them on an exhilarating adventure while shining a light into the darkest corners of the human experience.
Though utterly simplistic, “Persepolis” recounts the epic war time heartbreak and black hole of violence and horror in the vein of films like “Grave of the Fireflies” and “Osama,” and it’s a film I hope gets its due someday.
One moment, where people walk away from a significant, unseen disaster, reminded this critic of Grave of the Fireflies in how the small touches of mise-en-scène convey an extraordinary hopelessness born from an impossible tragedy.
Advertisement
Less known on these shores than Studio Ghibli cofounder and fellow animator Hayao Miyazaki, the tonally darker but similarly masterly Takahata (“Grave of the Fireflies,” “Pom Poko”) presents an all-ages adventure containing neither the fast action nor the wisecracking characters of Hollywood animated fare.
Known for more realistic anime films such as the heartbreaking “Grave of the Fireflies” and the underrated “Only Yesterday,” Takahata, 78, cuts loose with “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya,” a mythic story of a princess born inside a bamboo shoot who is raised by an elderly bamboo cutter and his wife and groomed against her will into a regal lady — in other words, her destiny at the cost of her free spirit.
But Isao Takahata, who partnered with Miyazaki and producer Toshio Suzuki to create the studio back in 1985, is no slouch either: his filmography ranges from the tragic masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies (1988), about two orphans struggling to survive the horror and privation of postwar Japan, to the wacky, Simpsons-esque My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999).
An ancient Japanese folk tale is brought to life by director Isao Takahata, who made "Grave of the Fireflies" and co-founded Studio Ghibli with the better known Hayao Miyazaki.
The film was directed by Isao Takahata, one of Ghibli’s founders, who’s been responsible for some of the studio’s most striking and unusual films (including the internationally acclaimed Grave Of The Fireflies and the vastly underrated Only Yesterday).
Lyrical, lovely, the picture is as stunning a document of youth as Isao Takahata's anime war idyll Grave of the Fireflies and successful in many of the same ways.
Yet none of this is played for sentiment, unlike similar scenes in Isao Takahata�s Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Hiroshi Shimizu�s Children of the Beehive (1948).