Uh-oh. I just learned that Grave of the Fireflies is streaming on Netflix. It’s a magnificent movie, but I don’t know if I could cope with the painful catharsis of seeing it again.
I took my daughter to see it years ago; I should ask her if she considers that a horrific instance of child abuse, or an opening of her emotional experiences. Or if she’d take her daughter to see it.
Here’s someone arguing that You Should Show Grave of the Fireflies to Your Kids. They make a good case.
It is okay for children to experience sad and even scary stories. In fact, doing so in safe environments is extremely healthy! Feeling sad allows us to learn empathy so we know how ourselves and others should be treated. The need to healthily experience sadness is literally the entire point of the movie Inside Out — a movie made with child audiences in mind — which will probably get its importance across better than any short paragraph I could write here. Sadness is an inevitable part of life, why would we want to leave children ill prepared to deal with it?
If the continued relevance of fairy tales and Goosebumps Books didn’t make it clear, stories that safely scare kids as part of consensual fear experiences are healthy for their development too. As psychologist Emma Kenny explained, “when you are reading a scary story to a child, or they’re reading to themselves, the child has got a level of control — they can put it down, or ask you to stop. And the story can raise a discussion, in which they can explore and explain the way they feel about a situation.”
I suspect that the kids could cope with the experience better than many parents, including myself.
I was one of the kids who did not read the manual. I hated scary stories, especially if I learned later that the scary thing in the story was a fantasy creation. ‘Why are you lying to me to scare me?’ was what I thought. To this day I avoid horror. I’m OK with suspense, I’m OK with realistic bad things happening. But no monsters.
There are no monsters in this movie (other than people, that is.) Also no lies, and no fantasy.
Anat @ #1: Interesting; I’m the opposite. I can handle monsters no problem. But I struggle with things like realistic depictions of suicide, or stories that show terminal illness, and most definitely violence against children. I even had to take a break from “In Bruges”. And I am still traumatized from my watching of “Incendies” some 15 years ago.
I still intend to watch “Grave of the Fireflies” eventually. I think a brief re-up of Netflix is in my family’s future.
@1: The only monster here is war. It’s a damn good movie, but holy shit, I was sobbing during the latter third. It is utterly gut wrenching.
sincarne@3: Same here. I read Lovecraft to relax in the evening, but realistic depictions of violence and cruelty hit me hard.
And no, I’m not gonna watch Grave of the Fireflies after what I read about it.
Someone on Discord mentioned Grave of the Fireflies when I was conveying my experience watching the traumatic Waltz with Bashir about a year ago. My curiosity had been piqued because creator Ari Folman and David Polonsky had collaborated on a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary that had generated some controversy at the time.
Waltz with Bashir was about an IDF soldier’s troubling personal experiences surrounding the Sabra and Shatilla massacre and would become more poignant just weeks later as Israel began to respond to the atrocities of October 7th. Ironic timing.
Waltz with Bashir was horrific for adult viewers. I don’t know if could handle Grave of the Fireflies
Yeah, one of those films I admire greatly, but could only watch once. Like Testament, with the incomparable Jane Alexander. I agreed with Roger Ebert’s view that only her performance made the film bearable. Just about.
I saw this back in University: fully agreed that it falls into the category of “everybody should watch this… but you’ll probably only want to watch it once”.
There’s also Barefoot Gen, a semi-autobiographical story from someone who survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
Sadly, as the number of people who can actually remember WWII and the damage done by it has declined towards zero, militarism has been building up in Japan again. See, for example, the late Shinzo Abe, who actively pissed off the Chinese by visiting graves of soldiers who were considered war criminals elsewhere and actively downplaying some of the less savoury aspects of Japanese history.
Watched Trainspotting with my twelve-year-old son many years ago. He had several questions which I answered. He’s in his thirties now and seems to be normal.
I’m going to finish it one day, but we broke off at the scene where Spoilers the maggots crawl all over mum.
jenorafeuer@8 Oh yeah, I read Barefoot Gen, well the first two volumes. One of the best manga I know, but quite intense.
I wonder if we got a similar situation with no one left who remembers the war here in Germany.
I grew up with my grandparents war stories, all the senseless death grandpa saw on the front and my grandmothers saw at home with the bomb raids. How the Jewish neighbours were suddenly “the enemy” and how everybody was afraid to say one wrong word or be caught listening to BBC.
I’m 50 now and the last one in my immediate family who witnessed the war died nearly ten years ago, and now the right wingers are the strongest party in the first state parliament, the first time since the war. Their strongest support comes from the younger voters, who probably never knew someone personally who witnessed the war and the rule of the Nazis.
As a child, when it came to the finality of death, Albert Lamorisse’s ‘The Red Balloon’ (1956) had quite an emotional impact.
One of the best antiwar movies ever. Highly recommended.
I also recommend The Burmese Harp aka Harp of Burma. Don’t know where it’s streaming. (Non-animated.)
hillaryrettig1@13
One of the great antiwar movies was Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. Quite a traumatizing movie to watch. My interest was of course piqued by Metallica’s “One”. Now I’m hearing that song in my head as I type. Donald Sutherland’s scenes as Jesus were priceless.
If I could make it through Johnny Got His Gun and Waltz with Bashir maybe I could handle Grave of the Fireflies? I dunno. Sounds intense.
And now I’m wondering where my copy of ‘When the Wind Blows’ by Raymond Briggs got to . . . I cried so much reading that.
I’ve read that exiting haunted houses is supposed to feel good, some kind of thrill. In my limited experience, I wasn’t even relieved that it was over, I felt lousy because it happened. Maybe because I wasn’t afraid so much as unsettled and saddened.
A quaint segmented path, crowded, with intermittent hostile strangers, harsh flashing lights, and loud noises, that I couldn’t leave except by continuing through.* Like asking to get punched, leaving sore, enjoying neither sensation. And thinking the whole time, “This is what going out in public is like; I don’t belong here,” or “If I drop something important to me in the dark, it will be trampled and no one will care.”
I think I saw an autobiographical webcomic once where—for a couple panels—the character binged scary movies from a rental store, framing depression as a narrowly-useful superpower that made her immune.
* There were probably bail-out doors I’d written off as emergency exits or too serious to use for mere unpleasantness.
Warning, the following rant includes a description of child abuse:
That’s all well and good if kids have a safe, supportive environment in which to experience sadness, grief, and fear, but the “let’s depress/scare the fuck out of the kiddos!” crowd never seems to consider what happens to those children who don’t grow up in that kind of environment.
When I was a kid, the best I could hope for was that my parents would merely refuse to acknowledge that I was scared or sad. Scorn and contempt were the more common response, especially if I said I didn’t want to watch something sad or scary. The disgust for my showing those emotions was bad enough, but if I cried too much, violence would inevitably result.
I remember vividly watching a scary movie with my parents when I was 6 or 7 years old called Nightmares. Nightmares is a horror anthology from the early 1980s that was originally intended to be pilot for a TV series. The series never got picked up, and so it was repackaged and released as a movie instead. In other words, though it does push the limits of what was permissible on TV back then, it’s not that scary. Nevertheless, the final segment, “The Night of the Rat” scared the hell of me, to the point that I was terrified of being alone that night.
“Night of the Rat” is about a gigantic, monster rat laying siege to this family’s house. It’s roughly the size of a large dog, highly intelligent, possessed of eerie powers, and seemingly intractably malevolent. It kills the family’s cat, destroys the child’s room while they’re out and, in the climax, comes burrowing out of the child’s wall to threaten her life.
I was convinced that the thing was in our house. We hadn’t been living there for very long, and it was a noisy old place. I was certain that, the moment my parents left me alone, it would come tunneling out of the walls or up through the floor and tear me to shreds, just like that poor cat.
My parent’s response to my fear was to toss me in a dark room and hold the door shut for hours, answering my screams for help with insults and ever-escalating threats. My fear eventually reached such heights that I actually saw the monsters rising up out of the floor and bursting out of the walls. It was a hallucination, of course, but I was well past reasoning that out by that point. I just screamed louder and beat my hands against the door until I passed out from exhaustion.
That, and other incidents (like telling me I couldn’t go to my grandfather’s funeral if I was going to be a brat, i.e. cry), did teach me how to deal with feelings like fear and sadness: keep them locked deep inside, trust no one and, when the feelings get too intense, I took a knife to my flesh to cut them away.
I take a dim view of anyone who thinks we should force kids to experience fear and sadness so that they can be “prepared to deal with it.” I hate all those fucking kids books with those fucking kid-lit awards because some person or animal dies in it, and a bunch of out-of-touch adults who don’t remember what it’s like to be that small and helpless think we should force them on young humans to ‘build character,’ or whatever the excuse du jour is… fuck that sadistic noise. The idea that kids “consent” to those experiences is garbage. If some adult wants them to go through it, the kid most likely doesn’t have a choice.
There’s more than enough sorrow and terror in the world without foisting more on kids who, for all the “experts” know, may have worse than no support. If a child wants to read something scary or watch something sad, that’s one thing, but otherwise it’s just the same sick “I had to do it, so they should have to go through it, too” mentality that’s at the heart of so much evil in our society.
Okay, rant over.
I could never understand the enthusiasm some people feel when their country starts (too often indiscriminately) bombing another country. It became utterly perverse after seeing this movie.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the same studio did the movie ‘My Neighbour Totoro’, on par with some of Disney’s classic animated family movies. I mention it because the two movies were shown as a double feature when Grave of the Fireflies was first released in Japanese theatres.
vucodlak @17 Unfortunately monsters do exist and I’m sorry you had to live with two of them.
Speaking of powerful anti-war films, the 1985 Russian/Belarus film ‘Come and See’ directed by Elem Kilmov is a truly excoriating experience. It’s set in Belarus during the Nazi occupation and follows the fortunes of a boy who gets caught up in it all. Visceral, powerful, and haunting.
No way in hell am I ever going to watch that one again. It’s an incredible animated film but I absolutely can’t take it.