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Barefoot Gen
From cyberpunk to historical drama, this week's lazy pulling-from-my-reviews-file post is about the two Barefoot Gen movies put out by Madhouse in the 1980's.
But before I begin, a shout out to the School Girls and Mobile Suits conference hosted by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I went last weekend, and it was amazing to talk to so many people who are passionate about watching, studying and creating anime and manga. Plus, I got to eat a funnel cake! I always wondered what a "funnel cake" was, and now I know. It's deliciousness with icing sugar on top. ^^
Now, on with the wartime drama. Yay?!
Barefoot Gen. Dir. Mori Masaki. Madhouse, 1983.
Barefoot Gen 2. Dir. Toshio Hirata. Madhouse, 1986.
These two films were released on one dvd, inviting comparison, and is there ever a difference between them. They’re both adapted from an autobiographical manga by Nakazawa Keiji, and tell the story of Gen, a little boy living in Hiroshima during WWII. For a good third of the first movie, things are ok. Gen plays energetically with his brother Shinji, helps his pacifist father, and catches a koi so his older sister can cook it up for their pregnant mother. Life is hard, but happy enough. Then the bomb hits. Everyone he knows except his mother dies horrifically, and she gives birth to a baby girl they name Tomoko, who also dies despite Gen’s efforts to get milk for her. But life doesn’t end for him. He adopts a new little brother, Ryuta, and the two find comfort in seeing the wheat grow again, a symbol of resilience and perseverance.
The second film picks up three years later, with Gen and Ryuta scraping out a living in the skeleton-haunted wreckage of Hiroshima. They spend their time between helping a gang of homeless outlaw orphans, complete with rough but fair-minded leader, and worrying about Gen’s mother, who is wasting away from a radiation disease. Joyful scenes of constructing a house for the orphans alternate with his mother’s heartbreaking collapses, until she finally dies. Like the first film, though, it ends on an optimistic note: even holding her ashes, Gen keeps on living and running.
Though they share the same source and characters, it’s amazing what difference three years (and probably a bigger budget) makes to the production values. The first film is drawn in a very cartoony, Tezuka-like style: the boys have legs that widen towards the ankle with big, blunt feet, and round eyes with a single point of eyelash. Their horsing around is vibrant and endearing, but the broad cartoon comedy is a bit jarring, given the seriousness of the subject matter. The famous bombing scene also looks “retro”: it’s basically a lot of still shots of multicoloured explosions with vibrating shadows, slow-motion flying debris, and grotesque disintegrating zombie-corpses. It has an impact like blunt force trauma.
The Japanese voice acting is equally rough. Gen speaks as if shouting all the time, and he often makes redundant comments like “Oh, no, everything’s on fire! My house is over there!” The best I can say about the production values is that the film dates itself –which might not be a bad thing in years to come.
In the second movie, on the other hand, the characters are in full animation, with designs more akin to Akira than Tezuka. There are no big effects scenes, but everything is just done better, from backgrounds to voice acting. The editing is more sophisticated, and it’s a fairly good-looking movie even by today’s standards. That said, though, the plot of the second film doesn’t have the directness of the first one: it feels less like a historically-grounded autobiography and more like a melodrama with stock characters, possibly on loan from Dickens (the dying mother, the streetwise scamp, the pitiful burned sister, the gang of ragamuffin orphans picked on by police…). So each has film has its strengths and weaknesses.
In ideology, at least, the two versions are pretty consistent: they are stories from the height of the bubble economy, urging continued perseverance and hard work by recalling the time when it was really necessary to give it all just to survive from one day to the next. I’m not being callous here: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inexcusable, to my mind, and the experiences of those who survived should be told, not repressed with shame. It must’ve taken a hell of a lot of courage to write the original manga. And I’m not saying anime automatically commercializes or waters down everything. But these films are just so insistent on the theme of upward growth that it starts to seem removed from the moment of real trauma, to become almost celebratory or nationalistic. Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, though grimmer all through, seems more powerful and convincing to me as an anti-war statement than showing Gen still making little wooden warships with Japanese flags to sail in memoriam.
(In retrospect, wonder how much I’m echoing Susan Napier on this. I read her chapter in Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle on these films last summer, and this may be part of her point too…?)
But before I begin, a shout out to the School Girls and Mobile Suits conference hosted by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I went last weekend, and it was amazing to talk to so many people who are passionate about watching, studying and creating anime and manga. Plus, I got to eat a funnel cake! I always wondered what a "funnel cake" was, and now I know. It's deliciousness with icing sugar on top. ^^
Now, on with the wartime drama. Yay?!
Barefoot Gen. Dir. Mori Masaki. Madhouse, 1983.
Barefoot Gen 2. Dir. Toshio Hirata. Madhouse, 1986.
These two films were released on one dvd, inviting comparison, and is there ever a difference between them. They’re both adapted from an autobiographical manga by Nakazawa Keiji, and tell the story of Gen, a little boy living in Hiroshima during WWII. For a good third of the first movie, things are ok. Gen plays energetically with his brother Shinji, helps his pacifist father, and catches a koi so his older sister can cook it up for their pregnant mother. Life is hard, but happy enough. Then the bomb hits. Everyone he knows except his mother dies horrifically, and she gives birth to a baby girl they name Tomoko, who also dies despite Gen’s efforts to get milk for her. But life doesn’t end for him. He adopts a new little brother, Ryuta, and the two find comfort in seeing the wheat grow again, a symbol of resilience and perseverance.
The second film picks up three years later, with Gen and Ryuta scraping out a living in the skeleton-haunted wreckage of Hiroshima. They spend their time between helping a gang of homeless outlaw orphans, complete with rough but fair-minded leader, and worrying about Gen’s mother, who is wasting away from a radiation disease. Joyful scenes of constructing a house for the orphans alternate with his mother’s heartbreaking collapses, until she finally dies. Like the first film, though, it ends on an optimistic note: even holding her ashes, Gen keeps on living and running.
Though they share the same source and characters, it’s amazing what difference three years (and probably a bigger budget) makes to the production values. The first film is drawn in a very cartoony, Tezuka-like style: the boys have legs that widen towards the ankle with big, blunt feet, and round eyes with a single point of eyelash. Their horsing around is vibrant and endearing, but the broad cartoon comedy is a bit jarring, given the seriousness of the subject matter. The famous bombing scene also looks “retro”: it’s basically a lot of still shots of multicoloured explosions with vibrating shadows, slow-motion flying debris, and grotesque disintegrating zombie-corpses. It has an impact like blunt force trauma.
The Japanese voice acting is equally rough. Gen speaks as if shouting all the time, and he often makes redundant comments like “Oh, no, everything’s on fire! My house is over there!” The best I can say about the production values is that the film dates itself –which might not be a bad thing in years to come.
In the second movie, on the other hand, the characters are in full animation, with designs more akin to Akira than Tezuka. There are no big effects scenes, but everything is just done better, from backgrounds to voice acting. The editing is more sophisticated, and it’s a fairly good-looking movie even by today’s standards. That said, though, the plot of the second film doesn’t have the directness of the first one: it feels less like a historically-grounded autobiography and more like a melodrama with stock characters, possibly on loan from Dickens (the dying mother, the streetwise scamp, the pitiful burned sister, the gang of ragamuffin orphans picked on by police…). So each has film has its strengths and weaknesses.
In ideology, at least, the two versions are pretty consistent: they are stories from the height of the bubble economy, urging continued perseverance and hard work by recalling the time when it was really necessary to give it all just to survive from one day to the next. I’m not being callous here: the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inexcusable, to my mind, and the experiences of those who survived should be told, not repressed with shame. It must’ve taken a hell of a lot of courage to write the original manga. And I’m not saying anime automatically commercializes or waters down everything. But these films are just so insistent on the theme of upward growth that it starts to seem removed from the moment of real trauma, to become almost celebratory or nationalistic. Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, though grimmer all through, seems more powerful and convincing to me as an anti-war statement than showing Gen still making little wooden warships with Japanese flags to sail in memoriam.
(In retrospect, wonder how much I’m echoing Susan Napier on this. I read her chapter in Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle on these films last summer, and this may be part of her point too…?)