Number Nine: Grave of the Fireflies (Takahata, 1988) [Y]

Most of the distinctions between American and Japanese animation are bogus. You might prefer big scooped eyes and pale faces to strange anthropomorphic animals, but in the end it's about the interplay between the artistry of the drawing and the emotional weight of the story. Sorry post-Toy Story Pixar, 3 hours of second rate Seinfeld jokes do not a classic make. Likewise about throwing vixens with 12-year-old bodies at your atrophied protagonist who happens to have some magical weapon or know ninjitsu.

Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of two children left orphaned by World War II, their mother killed in an American fire-bombing. The American fire-bombings are depicted as the horrific slaughterhouses that they were, and in current debates over the effectiveness of nation building it would serve us well to acknowledge just what went into the remaking, as morally justifiable as it was, of Germany and Japan. The movie also depicts the callous actions of Japanese civilians who failed to help the children who were obviously in need. The children briefly live with their aunt before becoming homeless. In a particularly heart-wrenching scene the older brother finds his sister eating rocks near the cave they live in, deliriously thinking that she has found food. A child's imagination mixes in the animated panels with the audience's forbidding anticipation of despair and death. As Rilke said, "beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us."

The director, Isao Takahata, has stated that the older brother is not intended to be a sympathetic character because his prideful actions contribute to his sister's death. This is true; however, his pride is the result of his youthful assumption of traditional cultural values. The extension of blame to society at large is inescapable. A bowl of rice for a child will cost significantly less than even the most nutritious trickled-down effluvia from on high.

Although the situation in Japan wasn't quite the same as it was in America, the harrowing opening scene showing a child dying alone in a public train station offers a stark indictment of the type of greed-induced emotional vacuum that came to be associated with the 80's. Sure, I hummed along to 'Under the Sea' as much as the next kid, but Grave of the Fireflies has an emotional weight unequaled in American animation since Dumbo's weird sense of cosmic dread.