0 Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Hotaru no haka, Japan, 89 minutes
Director: Isao Takahata
Writers: Akiyuki Nosaka, Isao Takahata
Production design: Ryoichi Sato
Art direction: Nizou Yamamoto
Music: Michio Mamiya
Editor: Takeshi Seyama
Cast/voices (English version): Rhoda Chrosite, J. Robert Spencer, Amy Jones, Veronica Taylor

Currently ranked at #110 on the user-voted list of the IMDb Top 250, with an average rating of 8.3/10 as of this writing, I suspect Grave of the Fireflies needs little introduction. Conceived originally as the historical/educational half of a double feature and paired with another early and popular effort from Studio Ghibli, My Neighbor Totoro—yes, the two could only be seen in the company of one another in their original release—Grave of the Fireflies has since gone on to occupy its unique position in cinema and animation history as one of the saddest and most powerful features of its kind. Nothing comes close unless you start to consider live-action pictures and even there it stacks up pretty well.

I like it too. The temptation always is simply to erupt with superlatives, but in terms of its cultural impact I'm not sure it can be overstated. Without Grave of the Fireflies you don't get the incinerator scene in Toy Story 3, for one example (or, also from Pixar, the first 10 minutes of Up). The closest analogue might be Art Spiegelman's Maus, which similarly took a vastly underestimated medium (comic books, as opposed to cartoon features) and made practically unprecedented strides in legitimizing it once and for all. Interestingly, they both accomplished this feat by grounding their stories in that great legitimizer of the 20th century, World War II.


As narrative, Grave of the Fireflies is what it is: set squarely in the literary tradition of realism, calculated and unflinching in its depiction of civilian life in wartime. It is easy enough to understand the impact when the basic elements are arranged and considered: war, death, human failing, privation, and ultimately starvation. But it's harder to prepare oneself for the extraordinary experience of seeing it. The 88-minute animated feature alternates effortlessly between beautiful cartoon fantasy set pieces, horror movie dynamics in the guise of scenes of war, and a tiny, wrenching story of a virtually anonymous pair of children destroyed even as we watch.

There are no surprises here. The first line of the movie is spoken in voiceover by the 12-year-old brother, Seita: "September 21, 1945. That was the night I died." It sets many things in motion all at once: the story of how the children died, the emotionally oppressive atmosphere of the movie, and the sense it bears of intricate flashbacks nested inside one another. Everything in this movie has already happened even before we see anything. It is all mediated by perception, memory, and sadness. It gives us that distance, at least.

With World War II winding down, a Japanese family tries to cope with the brutally annihilating air raids of the Allied forces in 1945, then pressing their advantage with punitive fury as they found themselves close to winning the war. The father of the family is away in the military. The mother is plagued with nagging health problems. Besides conventional bombing, they also endure fire-bombing air raids that obliterate whole swaths of towns, villages, and cities, burning them and their residents to cinders. (The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki go unremarked in the movie.) One such attack leaves the mother dying and then dead, with Seita and his six-year-old sister, Setsuko, left to fend for themselves. They can't, ultimately.

The cinematic  tools Grave of the Fireflies uses so masterfully are already present in its opening shot and scene: the stark, almost expressionistic way that it uses shadows and places its figures, the elliptical, sometimes confusing way that it moves in time, and the color palette, which pervasively skews to the warm end of the spectrum, with browns, oranges, yellows, and reds. It often feels suffocating and hellish. It is suffocating and hellish, let's be clear about that. There are also scenes filled with great natural light and color, and characters filled with joy—the good times, or the fantasies, where hope dwells stubbornly—but they are there for the contrast as much as anything. In one typical scene, Seita and Setsuko enjoy a beautiful and fun day at the beach. Then they find a corpse.

On some level it's undeniable that the picture is heartless about making one care for two people—two children, no less—and then destroying them almost casually. Worse, it is realistic about how the children handle their circumstances. We see it always from their point of view, but we also see that they think like children and make bad decisions. One feels utterly helpless watching things go from bad, which is approximately where the movie starts, to worst imaginable, which is approximately where it ends. There's nothing to do except weep.

So on some level, yes, that may be suspect—pure manipulation intended merely to wring tear ducts. But I think the clue to its most profound intentions—and, indeed, achievement—is in the title, in one of its pervasively recurring images and reflecting themes: the firefly, a bumbling insect, easily destroyed, but with a magical quality of lighting up the dark. "I can see you now," Setsuko gasps in one of the best scenes, when Seita lets them loose at night in the shelter they share. In just that way, Grave of the Fireflies makes me feel I can see Seita and Setsuko now, even in the darkness of (fictional) death and time passed. Even just the image of Setsuko's face, such as the first time we see it here, encountering her again seeing this movie again, can give my stomach a little knot of affection, trepidation, and sorrow. I know what's coming, and I'm happy for the time I get with her.

Original post

Round 2: Afterword
Yes, that's right, I was given two animated movies consecutively for this competition—an interesting challenge indeed. At least I had the advantage this time of having seen and appreciated the movie before. But it was not enough and I lost this round and was eliminated from the tournament. I had known from the first round that I had a tough opponent in "The Honorary Swede" (aka Martin of Martin Teller's Movie Reviews). He had a simple but effective device of boldfacing his references, which set his reviews apart and made them more scannable and fun to read, and he really seemed to know what he was talking about. After the competition was over, and I got a look at his blog, I realized how overmatched I was in terms of movie knowledge.

Alas for Martin, I suspect he might have been happier losing and avoiding the debacle that confronted him in the third round, when he faced off against a personal friend of the moderator. I know, in retrospect, I'm glad it wasn't me. The whole story is here—Martin is very kind to me along the way—with a reasonably deep comments section to round out the spins. And that will have to do, as the posts with the relevant rounds and their comments have been scrubbed from the LAMB site (rounds 3.1-3.3).

So it turned out to be a bit of a shabby episode, but all it really did was reveal again the problems of trying to do things on the Internet. The moderator and his pal weren't the only problem, just a really obvious one. There were others. The voting numbers changed radically from round to round. The voting patterns often looked as if people were arriving in groups to vote, often tilted toward one side. Maybe that was all just coincidences. People were also impatient with how slowly it seemed to progress, especially in the early rounds. It was hard to know which was the better position, top review or bottom. Sometimes the reviews were boring. Weekend traffic dropped considerably. It took a long time. When are we going to get there? My feet hurt.

Always a problem, but even so, I enjoyed giving it a try.

Detail: Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

0 The Little Mermaid (1989)

USA, 83 minutes
Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker
Writers: John Musker, Ron Clements, Hans Christian Andersen, Howard Ashman, Gerrit Graham, Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell
Art direction: Michael Peraza Jr., Donald Towns
Music: Alan Menken
Editor: Mark A. Hester
Cast/voices of: Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll, Samuel E. Wright, Buddy Hackett, Rene Auberjonois, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Paddi Edwards, Jason Marin, Kenneth Mars, Edie McClurg, Will Ryan, Ben Wright

The Little Mermaid is likely best known today as the picture that launched the Disney Renaissance, marking a return to form for the studio of a certain level of charm and brio. Following the deaths of co-founders Walt and Roy Disney in the '60s and '70s, the company had spent years wandering the deserts of mediocrity. After The Little Mermaid would come Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and many others through the '90s, most of them massive moneymakers. It may be tempting to locate the start of any such renaissance back one year, to the studio's collaboration with Steven Spielberg in 1988 on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In many ways, that's the picture that restored interest among mainstream audiences in feature-length animated entertainment (or semi-animated, as it mixes live action with the cartoons). But Roger Rabbit, for all its many impressive virtues, is hardly in the Disney style.

That would be the job of The Little Mermaid. No doubt there are volumes of behind-the-scenes corporate backstory to this movie, involving industry players, gutsy business calls, and various career-making and -breaking maneuvers. It's also easy enough to pick out various elements and call "formula"—yet another princess story based on yet another Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, yet another musical, and, as always, damnably cute more than 70% of the time. But in the end that's incidental to what ended up on the screen. In the watching, The Little Mermaid is one of those happy accidents where all pieces fall together and the result is something close to an ideal, achieved seemingly effortlessly.


Even for those less than dedicated followers of the studio, such as myself (herewith exposed to The Little Mermaid for the first time, which by the way is scheduled to be rereleased next year in a 3D version), the sheer professionalism of the production tends to make it go down easy. It moves from one intricate set piece to the next with a minimum of fuss, and always gracefully. It has a natural feel for the rhythms and counterpoints of both comedy and romance, playing them off each other expertly, the one always relieving the other as they periodically skirt close to excesses.

It's a musical, of course, and the one thing no one can deny is Disney's unique capability of marrying the exuberant fantasies of musicals with the natural expressiveness of animation. Several flat-out big musical production numbers are scattered along the way in the compact 83 minutes of The Little Mermaid, and they also go down easy, with sparkling variety from song to song. Ariel, the 16-year-old little mermaid of the title, is voiced by Jodi Benson, an accomplished singer and stage actress in her own right. One of the comic sidekicks of Ariel is a crab named Sebastian. He is possessed of a Jamaican patois and also holds a position as composer in the court of Ariel's father, King Triton. Sebastian leads a couple of the best numbers here, including "Under the Sea," which won an Oscar for Best Original Song (the picture also won an Oscar for Best Original Score) and comes with a decidedly calypso bent.

Another of her sidekicks, a seagull named Scuttle, is voiced by Buddy Hackett, and he's good, a familiar Disney presence, salting down the proceedings with his classic Vegas stand-up shtick, playing his usual amiable idiot. He gets some good gags right along—a phony expertise on the ways of humans, listening for a heartbeat in the sole of a foot, and so on. These bits come and go quickly in the flow of things, and they are economical about keeping the picture light and frothy.

I particularly appreciate that the filmmakers sharpen the contrasts with unsettling elements. The blundering wrath of King Triton is a fearsome sight to behold, and Ursula, a sea witch and an octopus with the style of a hammy grande dame, is genuinely malevolent, and cruel. What Ursula does to the "mer-people" she comes to own is definitely unpleasant, and so is she. But she's also bawdy, campy, and a lot of fun. In fact, she's one of the most indelible characters here. Mixing in a little darkness tends to make the white light brighter—a hallmark of Disney's stock in trade. Ursula, in that regard, is a classic creation.

I also appreciate that the filmmakers were not unmindful of the varieties of changing roles for women—princess stories had to be a lot easier to make before 1989! But they don't much duck the issues, instead attacking them head-on. Ariel is a fully empowered feminine figure, capable of a physically difficult rescue on the high seas of the drowning prince (and full-time boy scout) Eric and other feats atypical of most shy and retiring beautiful princesses. Ariel is not a bit shy and retiring, and she is clearly making her own choices every step of the way and taking responsibility for them.

In many ways the picture thus manages to have it both ways, a stunt that is probably harder than we can guess. If Ariel appears to be making conventional choices—beautiful princesses, after all, belong with handsome princes, right?—they are arguably enough radical. I mean, think about this for a second. She effectively chooses to throw over her own species, becoming human rather than remaining one of the "mer-people" she was raised as, separating herself forever from her family and loved ones, a choice that is analogous in its way to extremes of plastic surgery paired with a move to the other side of the planet. It's almost impossible to understate what a huge decision she makes here. Yet somehow the movie finds a way to gracefully elide such questions. Who wouldn't want to become human, given the chance? Becoming human is another constant in the Disney universe, here established early and often as one of Ariel's most enduring desires.

Yes, there is a vacuous Barbie and Ken aspect to the central love story here, with Ariel and the prince Eric appearing largely as anodyne, desexualized, and somewhat wooden cartoon-attractive figures of masculine and feminine regularity. But is there any other way to play it, particularly in a G-rated Disney animated musical feature? I don't think so. And the filmmakers do find ways to poke fun at the strictures they impose on themselves here even as they assiduously respect them. In one very brief scene, Ariel confronts a life-size statue of the prince. She gazes into the explicitly stone orbs under its brow, and purrs, "It has his eyes!"

The Little Mermaid marches straightway and unsurprisingly to its predictable happily-ever-after conclusion, but it loads up on effective touches large and small that make it memorable and a pleasure to return to: the genial ignorance of human ways (a fork is assumed to be a hair pick, which results in a good sight gag at a dinner table) ... the great jaw-snapping sound made by an attacking shark ... a terrific electrical storm at sea ... Eric's stone face surviving King Triton's destruction of the statue ... the neat way Ursula is given responsibility for the exposition, foreshadowing the second half of the story ... the transference of Ariel's voice to Ursula ... Sebastian's confrontations with the French chef Louis ... the way that Ariel, excited about her ride in a horse-and-buggy carriage, hangs off of it upside down to see the view from that angle—and many, many more. It is altogether a concise little marvel of storytelling with numerous pleasures at every juncture.

Original post

Round 1: Afterword
Whatever polling app was used no longer shows the results, but I won this round. I was actually more strategic than if I had been writing about it under other circumstances. In the first place, I wouldn't be writing about it. I have shunned Disney so long I just don't even know it that well, and I would more likely be looking at things like Fantasia and Pinocchio way before this. On the other hand, once I was committed to the review and looking at The Little Mermaid (for the first time in my life), I did enjoy it. My opponent, "Deems Taylor" (aka Nick Rehak of French Toast Sunday), was coming from another place: familiar with it from childhood, but now willing to call it a childish thing to put away. That alone miffed Disney partisans, which is partly what I mean about being strategic. I had a feeling stuff like that might happen. People as a class (and I am a person too, liable to this) are wary of critics and reviewers, and can tend to react weirdly when they perceive things they like being dumped on. So I approached my review as nutshell just-the-facts-ma'am history of cinema, made the most of what I liked about the movie, and skipped my own tormented take on Disney. Thus I might have got some votes of Disney partisans, but maybe I was being less than honest?

I should mention, by the way, that ultimately none of these contests drew numbers of votes that went even into three digits, and some of the less attended rounds might have even seen less than 10. So it was a very limited audience.

And as I drone along here, one more point I want to make is about length. The announced word count limit was 2,000, which is about twice as long as most of the movie reviews I write here, at least triple that of most of the other things, but more or less in line with a lot of the bloggers I read. Rightly or wrongly, I think of myself as someone who writes short, and part of my strategy was to write shorter than I anticipated my opponent would, which I figured as playing to a strength of mine. But my review was actually much longer.

Detail: The Little Mermaid (1989)

0 Shrek (2001)

USA, 90 minutes
Directors: Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson
Writers: William Steig, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman, Roger S.H. Schulman, Cody Cameron, Chris Miller, Conrad Vernon
Production design: James Hegedus
Art direction: Guillaume Aretos, Douglas Rogers
Music: Harry Gregson-Williams, John Powell
Editor: Sim Evan-Jones
Cast/voices of: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, John Lithgow, Vincent Cassel

What surprised me most about a revisit to Shrek is how dated it has become. (Full disclosure: though I saw Shrek when it was new, I have not since taken advantage of any of the offerings of the subsequent franchise, which include three sequels, five video games, various TV spinoffs, a comic book, and a Broadway musical.) I say this also acknowledging that many of its strengths are still there: taking a page out of The Princess Bride, it's as smart and knowing as ever about its sources, operates at both adult and kid levels, and tells its story with clarity, uncluttered by distraction. It's just complex enough to be interesting, it never cheats, and it is witty more often than gross (and even when it is gross, it is tame by today's standards).

One of the most obvious ways Shrek shows its age is also the one to be expected, which is the state of the art of the animation. I recall that the CGI here was considered one of its strong points on release, but now it just looks 12 years old—12 years that encompass a whole lot of innovation and development in the industry. Though it was conceived at one point in 3D, Shrek now seems to present-day animation somewhat as Hanna-Barbera of '70s TV was to it. But I don't make the finest distinctions among animation. The dated qualities of the Shrek CGI were enough for me to notice, but not enough to annoy. I would call Jay Ward one of my favorite animators and he's nothing if not primitive, so partly that's a matter of my own aesthetic. But another quality that dates Shrek is a bit more of an obstacle for me.


That's the music, which seems to me so wrong as to be painful, cringe-inducing in its own right. It's mired in late-'90s alt-rock cliché, which is already conceptually jarring even as texture here but made even more so when one gets down to specifics: two songs by Smash Mouth, including one, "All Star," that serves as theme, plus the Eels, Joan Jett (on her third or fourth rise), Self. They're all here. There's even John Cale warbling out a cover of a Leonard Cohen song, "Hallelujah," which I admit I was mighty happy to hear, but it was still a distraction from the picture.

Babe and The Matrix (of course) get referenced here. Cameron Diaz voices Princess Fiona. I don't have anything against Diaz, but she's by and large way overmatched, cast I suspect as much as anything because she was an "it" girl of the moment, riding high from turns in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, There's Something About Mary, Being John Malkovich (remarkably drabbed down), and Charlie's Angels. To me, she is another aspect of Shrek that seems stuck back there, a little overrated perhaps and certainly has not worn so well.

But the voice casting otherwise is actually one of the picture's great features. John Lithgow is fine swallowing the microphone as the big-chinned but fatally short Lord Farquaad. Mike Myers is great as Shrek, the big ugly green ogre with a Scottish accent who must rescue a princess in order to win back the privacy of his swamp that he craves. But Eddie Murphy as Donkey is the star of this show, slipping easily into all manner of shtick in his familiar stand-up style. He has rarely been in better form, reliably injecting laughs all the way through. Only one example: a discussion between Shrek and Donkey about the inner nature of ogres. Shrek says it is layered like an onion. This causes Donkey to go off on a long riff about parfaits. "You know, not everybody likes onions," he says. "Parfait's gotta be the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet."

Shrek is also a great parody of Disney features—it comes of a great love of them, which I can see better now, having finally relaxed my own personal ban on all things Disney, put in effect for a shifting constellation of reasons since about the age of 11. Shrek is programmatically the inversion of Disney, its heroes an ugly ogre, an ass, and a princess who (depending as always on the beholder) mysteriously shuttles between "beautiful" and "ugly," and with explicit references to the 1991 Beauty and the Beast, Peter Pan, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Snow White lift is notably good at turning tables. Princess Fiona, up early in the morning, finds a bluebird and sings to it, finally hitting a note that explodes the bird so she can steal the eggs.

There's more of that too. It really is pretty funny all the way through. The fairy tale narrative arc is ultimately very satisfying, ending on a big showy finish with a Monkees cover by Smash Mouth, "I'm a Believer." Bad music again, I know, yes, cringe cringe. But on the whole the movie works so that such things become forgivable.

Detail: Shrek (2001)