Grave of the Fireflies 1988
In the desperate wartime world of Isao Takahata’s painfully vital film, love is very hard to find in any corner. Bombs fall. Fires rage. No one trusts you, not even the aunt who has adopted you. No one has mercy on you, even if you are an orphan caught stealing sugar cane intended to nourish your dying sister. You may go to your grave with bitterness as your only food.
Yet here are Seita and Setsuko, children of a Japanese Navy captain near the close of World War II. The world around them may not seem to have any love in it. Yet right in the midst of that world, we see this vulnerable brother and sister loving each other as tenderly as you have ever seen film characters love one another.
The film begins in wartime, yet we get the idea life was simple before the bombs started falling close to home. When we see Seita and his 4-year old sister Setsuko at home with their mother in an early scene, the setting seems idyllic even though the family has been urged to take shelter immediately. The idyll is split horrifically open as the kids’ Mom dies in a bombing. Her death, alongside the reality of an absent Navy captain father, makes desperate orphans of the children.
Seita spends most of the rest of the film struggling not only to be a good brother but also a parent to little Setsuko. We see how this older brother risks his own life to bring food to his sister. We see him tenderly caring for her flesh and bone as he combs her hair and brings her to the beach to bathe and soothe her inflamed skin. We see him grieving alongside her when she learns her mother has died. We see how he protects her from the ravages of the war around her. He covers her with his body during air raids.
Seita makes a cave home for Setsuko that he fills with joy and memory. This is demonstrated in an unforgettable sequence in which he collects fireflies with her and then brings them into the cave to illuminate the darkness. Their home is now filled not only with the physical light of the fireflies. It is also made bright by the rich glow of family memory. The insects’ light illustrates a story this brother shares with his sister. It is a family story, and one that would have satisfied The Tree of Life’s son who asked his mother to “tell us a story from before we can remember.”
Though the decision to leave the home of a potential adoptive aunt is not Seita’s wisest hour, he nevertheless loves Setsuko with compassion and self-sacrifice. The wisdom he lacks seems small in the shadow of his love, and indeed the shadow of his own love eclipses some of the burn of the self-righteous “love” that the aunt was giving the children.
There is a scene in the film in which we follow two small fireflies from the mouth of the cave where Seita has just comforted Setsuko in her grieving. He has been telling her they will someday be able to visit the mother’s grave. The two small points of light flit into the living space of the two orphans, briefly throwing light onto their small number of possessions. Then we watch the pair of lights pass into the pitch-black depths of the cave until they are all we see in the black sea of the screen. The lights do soon both go out, but not before they have given brave notice of their presence to the engulfing darkness. Firebombing and fireflies, the first exchanged for the second. Death and destruction willfully replaced by love.
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” – 1 Corinthians 13 : 13
