Barefoot Gen

[sanet]

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…?)

Comments

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Well, Frenchy says she's going to go all-out since it's the 10th anniversary. Though being in Japan is a good excuse not to be able to go. ^_^

I think memories of the Asia-Pacific Wars have been used as foundations of national narratives throughout northeast Asia--and I wouldn't be surprised about south(east) Asia either, though I know thumbnails' worth about those countries and can't actually say. Certainly the ROC and the PRC to some extent based their legitimacy and their raisons d'etre on what they did and didn't do in the wars. I think for both countries those narratives' imporatance has been de-emphasized, but they can certainly be pulled off the shelf so that pages can be taken out of them as necessary. For that matter, I think the same could be argued for both of the Koreas--and the DPRK may be the one place where that narrative hasn't been substantially revised.

In Japan at least, though, the focus is almost exclusively on exclusively Japanese suffering during the wars, Grave of the Fireflies being the example par excellence. I just watched Mouryou no Hako, which explicitly mentions Unit 731 and the atrocities it committed in Manchukuo/Manchuria, but it's a rare exception that proves the rule, and though most of the characters in that anime fought in the war, the only deaths that disturb them are Japanese. [I wrote more about it on my own LJ, incidentally.] Even a movie like Millennium Actress, which actually partly takes place in Manchukuo and also explicitly shows the oppressive nature of the imperial government, doesn't go any farther than that.

The immediate objection to my argument is that these narratives don't really have room to include a non-Japanese perspective. I also wonder what role any sublimated U.S. atomic guilt may have played in popularizing the Barefoot Gen movies in particular in North America.

[merin-chan.livejournal.com]

Ah, I read your post on Mouryou no Hako and thought it looked really interesting. I'll definitely have to see that one, it sounds like it raises some important issues. In fact, I just read a book called The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan by Michael Baskett, and he also argues that even in the postwar period, the "imaginary of empire" persisted in Japanese film, especially in victimization films that "recognized that the Japanese military had been wrong to advance into China, but also subsumed Asian suffering into the larger cauldron of human suffering, relieving individual Japanese of the need to remember themselves as aggressors." (To be fair, he also notes that the drive to imperialism was felt all over Asia, even in colonized countries like Korea. So you're right, it's not just a Japanese thing.)

Now, do you think anime that depict Japanese imperialism in Asia, even in passing as in Millennium Actress, work against this sort of sanctioned national amnesia? They may not be able to include non-Japanese perspectives (I'm not sure they could without risking accusations of appropriating the voices the formerly colonized) but they are a little more aware of Japan's history in Asia than Gen and even Grave of the Fireflies.

Also, intriguing idea about the American reception of Gen. That would be a great way to start looking at it from a transnational rather than just nationalist perspective!

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I've heard people say that cute is what remains of the Japanese empire, and I think people like Tom LaMarre, and Baskett, would change that statement to "anime (and manga) is what's left of the Japanese empire." Have you read LaMarre and Ohtsuka's pieces in Mechademia on wartime animation? They are thought-provoking to say the least.

Now, do you think anime that depict Japanese imperialism in Asia, even in passing as in Millennium Actress, work against this sort of sanctioned national amnesia?

Hmm. I'd have to give that one a qualified "yes." I think that, even if anime and manga as we know it today were transformed by the wartime national-imperial project, both are certainly capable of problematizing the war. There's a manga written by Ohtsuka, Hokushin Denki, that I'm thinking of in particular here--it features a half-Japanese aboriginal folklorist protege of Yanagita Kunio in Manchuria and in Japan and his struggles against the (agents of the) empire.

[merin-chan.livejournal.com]

I agree that Baskett (and East Asia scholars like Koichi Iwabuchi) would say anime is neo-imperial, but I'm not sure about Tom Lamarre. One thing I like about his Mechademia article is that he says there are many ways wartime depictions of "speciesism" continue in the postwar period, from unthinking repetition to criticism. I can't wait to read the second part in vol. 4 and see if he elaborates more on the critical uses of racialized animal imagery in the postwar period.

That manga by Ohtsuka sounds really cool. You know about so many different anime and manga, and you draw on them to make points so well. Thanks!

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

One thing I like about his Mechademia article is that he says there are many ways wartime depictions of "speciesism" continue in the postwar period, from unthinking repetition to criticism.

That's a good point. From Ohtsuka, though, I've gotten the impression that the medium itself is a product of the wartime crucible, which leads me to wonder about the ability to criticize a phenomenon in a form created by that same phenomenon. I think, though, that Ohtsuka sometimes takes a deliberately provocative stance, in order to be thought-provoking.

Enh, I got paid to read manga for a year, and I did. ^_^

[merin-chan.livejournal.com]

Actually, Ohtsuka's argument is not so far out there. Lots of media theorists argue that film as a medium is based in the technologies and ideologies of war. (Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler are the guys I've read who claim this.) But it seems to me to get a bit technologically determinist sometimes, like they're saying "Once a war-machine, always a war-machine." That doesn't strike me as helpful. Instead, I like to think that media, like Donna Haraway's cyborgs, can be "unfaithful to their origins." That's why I hold out hope for anime to criticize war self-reflexively, by looking at its own histories and technologies -like in Millennium Actress.

I'm terribly optimistic sometimes. ^_^

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Swords into ploughshares, celluloid into criticism?

It does seem to be a (technologically) determinist idea, when you put it that way--but I think that inasmuch as war boosterism is easy in anime, or film, the media do in fact lend themselves to promotion rather than criticism.

I haven't read Haraway, but her idea about cyborgs (i.e. posthuman subjects) being unfaithful to their origins strikes me to be exactly what posthumanist subjects--women, non-heterosexuals, non-white people, non-able-bodied people--are doing when they engage in what I think of as productive misreading of texts (media, books, discourses) that aren't obviously aimed at their viewpoints. Like Sonya Sotomayor, the new U.S. Supreme Court justice, being a huge Nancy Drew fan. So I think that it's not only possible to be unfaithful in that way, but absolutely necessary.