Be careful finding meaning in foreign films

My colleague Ryan Pitts tried for months to get me to watch the animated Japanese film “Grave of the Fireflies.” I borrowed a copy once before, but the darkness of the story – it follows two children who struggle to survive following the 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo – kept me from ever thinking the time was right.

Then I took the opportunity over this past weekend to see what the film has to offer. It surprised me and confirmed my suspicions at once.

The film is dark, both in theme and style. What surprised me, though, was that I expected the film – which was directed by Isao Takahata , who adapted the prize-winning novel by Akiyuki Nosaka – to indict the U.S.’s World War II policy of targeting civilians. It isn’t.

Instead, I read it as an indictment of Japanese society – a place where a 14-year-old boy, having lost his mother and father, is expected to get over his grief quickly. A boy who is badgered and mistreated by an aunt who, though agreeing to take in the boy and his 4-year-old sister, continually asks whether the two orphans have any other relatives they can live with.

Imagine my surprise, then, when in the special features of the DVD director Takahata explains that what he intended was to criticize the boy. That the film he made in 1988 was meant as criticism, too, of that generation of Japanese youth who believed (in Takahata’s view) that money could buy anything.

I’ve before never felt such a rush of cultural dissonance. “Grave of the Fireflies” is a great film, one that is worthy of all the praise that has come its way. But I just wonder how many Western critics really understand what Takahata was really trying to say.