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Here is the transcript.
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You know I've seen a lot of war films, and many of them are exciting, or moving, or dramatic, or artistically effective, and a few of them actually reach you on an emotional level and not just at the action level. I was amazed the first time I saw Grave of the Fireflies to find that I was actually moved just about to tears by this film. I think people who don't know what to expect are going to be very surprised by it. So this film, has an emotional breadth to it, involving war, and the results of war, and the victims of war, that is astonishing.
I met a group of Asian film makers from Vietnam at the Hawaiian film festival who had come over with a group of their films about the war, showing the other side of that war. And I noticed that in none of their films did they ever mention the United States. It was just the enemy. And I asked them about that and they said, "we've had so many enemies over the years. We've had China, and the French, and the Americans, and who knows who's next. The way we look at it is, we are we, and anyone who comes to attack us is the enemy, and the identity is not so important as the fact that they are our enemy".
I think maybe this movie is saying that firebombing is not a very precise way of going after the enemy. It's a way to destroy morale, it's a way to breakdown a nation's resistance, but at the same time, are we really thinking about people like this little brother and his younger sister, when we dropped those bombs, or are we managing to objectify the Japanese as an evil race who deserve to have this happen to them.
Well of course everytime you look at a cartoon of any sort, it's unrealistic. No bunny looks like Bugs, no mouse looks like Mickey, and the people in the world we live in don't look like the people in Grave of the Fireflies. In addition to that, Japanese anime in particular likes to use extremely plastic faces, very big eyes, and that's a style, and I think you have to get accustomed to it as a style, I think it would ve wrong to say "I don't like this movie because the eyes are too big". In fact, the reason that eyes are so big in Japanese anime, as I understand it, is because they were influenced by early Disney pictures. They felt that by exaggerating the features they were making the characters more saturated with personality. It is true that one of the things the early American animators discovered was that in order to sell personality with cartoon characters, you had to find attributes they had an exaggerate them, you didn't want to make cartoons of people that looked like regular people.
In the case of Grave of the Fireflies, and any anime film as far as I'm concerned, what happens is, the emotion is underneath the art, and it doesn't matter that these don't look like people in the real world because we quickly begin to read them as the people in the real world of this movie - as the characters in this movie, we identify with them, and with their predicament, and with their personalities and with what they try to do. What I find in a lot of these Japanese films is a watercolor look, a painterly look , if you look at Totoro, for example, it looks like it was done with watercolor, a lot of it, especially the backgrounds. There's a certain charm to that, a warmth, as opposed to the higher outlines and colors of a lot of American animation. I like that it looks more painterly, I think that in the very early days of animated cartoons, they were very much influenced by comic strips, and a cartoon would look like an animated comic strip from the Sunday newspaper. And in fact, it could look also like a drawing from life, and a lot of short animated filmss do that. But if you're looking for features that do that, usually you have to look from Japan.
Well you know in Japanese poetry, they use a pillow word - a word or short phrase that essentially is just a musical beat between what went before , and what went after. And then if you look at the films of a great director like Ozu, who I think is one of the finest movie directors who've ever lived, you will find what I call pillow shots. He'll be telling a story and it'll take place in a house and it might involve a father and his daughter, and some people who come to visit, or the neighbors next door, or maybe a women the father is going to marry or perhaps a man the daughter will marry, and they'll talk, and then there will be a certain phrase will end, and he'll cut outside , and he'll show something. Not necessarily a beautiful shot, maybe just a shot of the corner of a building and some railroad tracks in the background. Or maybe a window and a roofline and electrical wires, or a tree and a street, and he'll hold on that, and then he'll come back inside. He's using it as punctuation, it's a form of silence. It's a form of saying let's not rush headlong from each scene, let's say this has happened, now we'll look out and think about it, and then this will happen, and we'll think about it...and that use of the pillow shot gives his films a kind of thoughtfulness and pacing, that becomes really important to you after a while...you begin to appreciate it.
In Grave of the Fireflies, there are also moments like that, there are moments when not much happens, and that to me is one of the key elements of all Japanese animation, is that they are willing to go to all that trouble to animate little inconsequential moments. Somebody just doing a little behaviour, somebody adjusting their clothing, or just turning around and turning back. So the fact that they just give themselves the luxury of putting in extra stuff, additional stuff, the Fireflies for example, in Grave of the Fireflies, that they use to illuminate their cave, are very beautiful and their given a little moment of silence and contemplation and mystery.
Occasionally some people will look at some anime and say it's not as technically as sophisticated as American animation. American animation attempts to reproduce motion at twenty four frames per second to look more or less like objects and animals and people really do look like when they're moving and some Japanese anime uses fewer frames per second in order to economize how many frames they draw, so the animation is not fluid or realistic, and the backgrounds maybe not as detailed and the figures not as fully articulated, and perhaps only parts of the image are moving at any given time. I think to me, if the story is working and the characters are involving, and the artistic imagination is there, and if the eye is there, then those other things simply become stylistic details that become less important as the film goes on. You know you're not looking at the whole film just on the basis of some abstract idea of technical excellence, you're looking at it in terms of its excellence as art, and art doesn't always depend on how many frames per second, or how this was done or that was done. It depends upon how it makes you feel.
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11.28.2013, 07:32 PM
Roger Ebert on Grave of the Fireflies
