Spoilers
Okay people. Please don't burn me as an animation heretic. I love animation as much as anybody, but nothing is going to change my thoughts about this movie. I find it hard to swallow myself, but here goes anyways.
After hearing all the words of praise for this film, after hearing all the "powerful"s and the "best animated movie ever"s, I finally got this movie expecting to be enlightened about what animation could do. After viewing it, I was a little confused about my reaction towards the movie and mildly disappointed as well. Is this the best animated movie ever? No. In my opinion, the best animated movies ever made were created during Disney's very early days. No, this isn't the ramblings of a Disney fanatic. It is my strong opinion that animated movies from Disney during its early years were crafted with the finest quality possible, and this has yet to be topped by anyone, Disney, anime, or otherwise. Is this a bad movie? Not by a long shot, but one of two things happened while I was watching. Either I and the fans saw two completely different movies, or this has got to be the most overpraised animated movie in existence.
So let me start off with what I liked about this film. Like what many critics and fans said, this movie had a rigorous attention to detail and a certain poetic texture, and I picked this up right away. Instead of relying on the usual formulas and conventions to tell a story a give its anti-war message, this movie goes for solid realism. Idealism doesn't exist in this movie. The movie doesn't try to go for our sympathy towards the Japanese. Instead, it focuses on the main characters and what they go through. Every character is portrayed realistically. The two main characters are likeable enough as well.
Unfortunately, this movie seems to over-extend itself. The movie goes for broad poetic strokes, true enough, but this, to me, seems to all but dull what would otherwise be dramatic moments. Maybe it's just me, but I prefer conciseness to long stretches. There were quite a few moments of drama that I liked, such as the death of the two main characters' mother. These were done swiftly and efficiently and were hammered home. However, such moments are few and far between.
Sometimes the realism in this seemed to work against itself. I love realism as much as I love cartoony, but realism shouldn't have to sacrifice making the characters interesting. I don't want to sound cold, but part of the reason people watch movies is for escapism. I like my characters to be believable yet caricatured enough to stand out. It is this kind of characterization that makes movies like Toy Story 2 and Shrek so great. The characters move us with their intelligent dialogue and enchant us with their winning personalities. In this movie, however, dialogue at times seems to resemble what you can hear in everyday life. This type of dialogue doesn't interest me in the least as it doesn't allow for interesting and complex character interaction. The characters themselves, while likeable enough, didn't affect me in a way I would've liked. Despite the dramatic events unfolding around them, they just weren't dramatically interesting to me.
While Grave of the Fireflies is simple compared to the heavy complexities of much of anime, there were some things about this movie that I didn't understand. The revealing of the fact that both of the main characters are dead and telling the story from beyond the grave didn't make much narrative sense and only served to distract from my experience of the movie. Also, why did Seita allow the starvation of both Setsuko and himself simply because of pride?
I'm not usually one to pick on animation, but quality of animation is often what determines the strength of the experience and believability of the characters, as does the strength of the music. I don't remember much about the music in this movie. If it was in there, it was so subdued that I didn't notice it. The animation in this movie is servicable and thankfully free of the conventions found in standard anime, but it is nowhere near as expressive or impressive as I would've liked, especially when compared with the animation in all the wonderful Disney movies I grew up on. The color scheme in this movie is also mundane and didn't appeal to me.
This movie, for the most part, showed remarkable restraint, and I liked this, but towards the end it started to become heavy melodrama, and this turned me off. I love heartfelt movies as much as anyone, but true emotion is earned through proper character interaction and story development and not gotten through manipulation. Melodrama is emotion that results from manipulation. I'm sorry if this offends anybody, but this is what it felt like.
Don't go thinking I hate this movie or think it is a bad movie. It is realistic, grisly and detailed, and I like this in a movie. It is also a thoughtful and meaningful movie. But an animated movie can be entertaining and meaningful at the same time. Just look at Beauty and the Beast or The Iron Giant. Unfortunately, Grave of the Fireflies is one but not the other.
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