My Take | Cartoons draw wrong conclusions on second world war

Japanese anime regarding the conflict may be beautiful and heart-rending to watch, but one should not forget who started hostilities and spread horror

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A scene from the Studio Ghibli’s 1988 anime ‘Grave of the Fireflies’. Photo: Handout

Published: 3:08am, 18 Apr 2018Updated: 3:08am, 18 Apr 2018

Unlike most Western cartoons, Japanese anime covers the whole range of cinema, from violent pornography and gangster comics to child animation and high art. Most of us in Hong Kong grew up on anime; some of us still haven’t outgrown it.

But it’s precisely when it is a work of art that it can become insidious. One such masterpiece is Grave of the Fireflies, directed by the legendary animator Isao Takahata, who died earlier this month. His worldwide fans celebrated the war anime, which was profiled by the BBC this week.

The 1988 anime is well-known to many Hongkongers. It is beautiful and heart-rending to watch, as the two lovable characters, a teenage brother and younger sister, go from despair to starvation and death at the closing months of the second world war.

The little sister carries a tin can containing sweets, which has since become iconic due to the popularity of the movie. When the siblings run out of sweets and have nothing to eat, the brother mixes some water in the can with sugar residue for his sister to cheer her up. After she dies, he keeps her ashes and bone fragments in it.

The anime is not just sad, but infuriatingly manipulative. Many professional film critics, however, think otherwise. The late critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the greatest war films ever made”. Really?!