Tragedy and Anti-Tragedy: Two Ways Of Representing Historical Traumas

This article is a comparative piece focusing on Grave Of The Fireflies (1988) and In This Corner Of The World (2016). Both of these works are animated films which represent the impacts of Japanese cities being bombed in WWII. Despite their commonality, they represent these events in an extremely different way, with Grave being a tragedy and In This Corner being an anti-tragedy. Therefore, they make for a strong case study of the distinction between stories about tragic events and stories that fit into the literary genre of tragedy. I’m currently working on a second piece which discusses these films from a perspective of historical ethics. I initially included it within this article, but I found it was getting too long-winded and distant from the original ideas. While my discussion on these films won’t be complete until that article is released, I think there’s enough in this piece for me to release it on its own.

Grave Of The Fireflies has one of the harshest openings in film history. The protagonist Seita dies from starvation in a train station; the adults around him either look in disgust or try to avoid him. After Seita dies, he appears amongst several other corpses of characters around a similar age. The train station attendant says “Another one” with complete indifference. This is also the opening scene of the semi-autobiographical short story that Takahata’s film is based on. Seita’s fate is the primary deviation from the experience of its author, Akiyuki Nosaka. It is this choice that transforms Grave Of The Fireflies into a tragedy. Of course, the story is tragic regardless of whether or not Seita dies. But there’s a distinction between a story with tragic events and a story that fits into the tragedy genre. Tragedy seals the characters into a spiral, leading to a devastating event that the story sets up from the get-go. Whether this spiral is driven by the forces of fate or the characters’ own poor decisions, everything in the story brings itself towards that climax (typically involving the deaths of either the protagonist or another important character). The bluntest way to evoke this feeling is by directly informing the audience of how things will end, but I think even tragedies that don’t do this will create a strong sense of where everything is headed. Tragedy is guided by this certainty and the horrible, all-encompassing feeling of dread that comes with it. What I find fascinating about the genre of tragedy is that it creates a narrative state where all order is threatened and ‘normal life’ cannot continue for the characters. Order may be restored after the tragic event (as it is in many of Shakespeare’s tragedies), but life as it was cannot continue — once the spiral is locked in, the lives of the characters become a march into death. The tragedy of Grave is that Seita and Setsuko are locked in a state where childhood cannot continue, but we know they cannot grow up.

Grave is often described as an anti-war film, a label that Takahata denied. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Takahata didn’t have anti-war views. Takahata argued that Grave would be largely ineffectual if its purpose were to stop wars, because politicians often leverage tragedies like the one in Grave to support wars under the pretense that war is necessary to prevent those situations. While the director’s word is not the last one on their films, his position is useful for understanding the issues of approaching Grave entirely as an anti-war film. I think much of the discussion of Grave has been marred by the assumption that a film’s purpose is in its ‘message’, an assertion that devalues complexity and views films in terms of a utilitarian purpose. A better way of looking at is that Takahata’s anti-war ideology is obviously evident in the film, but the film’s overall purpose goes beyond merely pushing that ideology. I believe Grave’s use of tragedy mainly fits into Takahata’s interest and exploration of the loss of innocence across his career. Only Yesterday and The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya both focus on the transition from childhood to adulthood, and how one’s self and dreams are crushed under the weight of social factors beyond their control. Takahata also strongly emphasises this theme in his television adaptation of Anne Of Green Gables, though in that series it’s more about the progression of time itself than social factors. Pom Poko is not about childhood, but it extends this theme to the experience of losing your culture in the face of assimilation. In these works, there’s a profound yearning for innocence and an intense sense of loss towards its destruction. Grave Of The Fireflies is the most blunt exploration of this idea — it’s a tragedy about the desperation of trying to preserve an innocence that has already been lost.

One of the more heavily debated elements of the film is how responsible Seita is for Setsuko’s death. In the middle of the film, Seita and Setsuko are being taken care of by their aunt, who becomes increasingly resentful and emotionally abusive towards them. Seita leaves their aunt and brings Setsuko to live in a cave they’ve been playing in throughout the story. In the final third, things turn increasingly disastrous as it becomes evident that Seita cannot take care of Setsuko on his own. She becomes increasingly malnourished. In one scene Seita seeks a farmer’s help. The farmer is one of the few adults in the movie to be sympathetic to his plight rather than cruelly indifferent, but he still tells Seita he cannot help him, that he should swallow his pride and move back in with his aunt. Seita refuses to do so and Setsuko eventually dies of her malnourishment. Effectively, it is Seita’s pride in the final third that causes the tragedy of Setsuko’s death. This element complicates the film significantly. It’s key to why the film is more than a mere anti-war film.

Bad faith readings of the film suffer the most from the way they interpret Seita’s character. YouTuber Bennet The Sage’s review of the film seems to be a strong source of misinformation regarding Takahata’s intent, and his arguments have frequently been picked up in online discussions of the film. Sage’s argument against the film is that it emotionally manipulates the viewer because their investment in the characters is dependent on their situation, not for who they are as people. He suggests that Seita and Setsuko’s roles are symbolic representations of children in general, and that one could tell the story with any two children. While this argument is understandable for Setsuko, it is silly to think that Seita’s role is entirely passive or that there are no nuances to his characterisation, especially with this flaw in mind. Another bad faith reading from film critic Mike D’Angelo goes too far in the other direction. He suggests that the film is, in theory, an “anti-idiocy movie” rather than an anti-war movie, and argues that Seita “essentially kills himself and Setsuko simply because he doesn’t like being nagged”. I take issue with this reading because it refuses to read anything more into Seita’s actions beyond pure selfishness. It is true that his actions are what cause Setsuko’s death, but the choices he makes are still the product of his circumstances.

Perhaps the easiest thing to point to is that Seita is fourteen years old — he is already at an age that does not grant much capability to make the ‘right’ decisions at any time, let alone in circumstances that no child should be in. While he is old enough to know the full details of the horrors around him, he can’t yet process them. Seita is also the victim of an utterly heartless adult world. Returning to the opening scene, one of the points that Takahata makes very clear is that the adult world is utterly indifferent to the plight of children and that the deaths of children have become normalised in this setting. Not every adult character is cruel. Even in the opening there’s a brief moment of someone putting down a rice ball for Seita, though Seita does not see it, and it can easily be missed by the audience. But even the adult characters who aren’t indifferent are ultimately unable to do much to help because everyone has their own concerns to attend to. This callousness and indifference is embodied most strongly in Seita’s aunt. Seita’s actions make the most sense as a response to the failures of the adults around him. He is unable to accept that world, and does not want to bring Setsuko into it, so he instead retreats into childhood. His actions in the final third of the film are a desperate attempt to maintain Setsuko’s innocence. While his pride destroys her, it emerges out of the noble attempt to save her. This contradiction is why Seita perfectly fits the Aristotelian definition of a tragic hero. The tragic hero is a character who has good and noble traits but suffers from human error and commits terrible actions without evil intent — often, their admirable qualities are what lead them to their destruction. I think what makes Seita resonate as a character is that his selfishness and selflessness are intertwined and that his virtues are also his flaws. I find the saddest scene in the film is the one where Setsuko reveals that she already knows their mother is dead, because it hammers in that Seita’s goals are futile. He cannot protect Setsuko from the world around them. Seita suffers from hubris — after this scene, it becomes clear that he cannot reach his goal, but he insists on it even as it destroys him and Setsuko. He experiences the tragic pursuit of trying to reach something that can never be regained.

A common piece of misinformation on the film is that it changes the original story from Nosaka’s experience by having Seita die, and therefore repreiving him from the survivor’s guilt that drove Nosaka to write the story. In the Sage and D’Angelo reviews this is paired with an accusation against Takahata for using a real person’s experience to suit his own agenda. This accusation can be debunked just by reading the original story, where Seita’s death is the opening scene. In a 1987 interview with Takahata and Nosaka that was published in Animage, Nosaka refers to the story as an “idealized” interpretation of the real events. One might scratch their head at how such a depressing story could be “idealized”, but Nosaka’s explanation of his real experience makes this idealization very evident. Nosaka believes that growing up is typically a slow process of experiencing failures and betrayal, but he had to go through 10 years' worth of that in a month, leading to his morality eroding. His sister’s malnutrition did not happen out of noble intent on his part but instead happened because he would eat any food they encountered without thinking about her. Nosaka believed in his head that he would give any food to his sister and experienced intense guilt after eating the food, but he couldn’t prevent himself in the actual moment. He explains that he made Seita’s character a better human being in the process of writing the story because he could not bring himself to write what he actually did. Nosaka also describes reacting with confusion at the continuation of ordinary life after the war, feeling that he could accept himself in a world as dark as the wartime years he lived through, but that he couldn’t find a place in a ‘light’ world. He speaks of his disgust towards his own story, saying that he has never re-read it because of its hypocrisy.

To return to the genre of tragedy, what I find especially fascinating about Nosaka’s interview is that the changes that ‘idealise’ the story are the ones that make it a tragedy in the literary sense, rather than just a story about tragic events. The most obvious case here is the story opening on Seita’s death, but it also applies to Seita’s position as a tragic hero. In another part of the Animage interview, Nosaka requests to Takahata that he include some of what couldn’t be included in the original novel. Takahata’s response is somewhat hesitant. It seems that his characterisation in the final film is a compromise, where Seita is still responsible for Setsuko’s death, but his failure comes from innocent intentions and his pride, rather than what was ultimately selfishness in Nosaka’s case. I don’t say this to condemn Nosaka, as these are the terms with which he describes himself. The survivor’s guilt that he describes in that interview isn’t something I’d wish on anyone. However, regardless of whether Seita was actually conceived of as an Aristotelian tragic hero, it’s clear that his transformation into that kind of role is a product of ‘idealisation’. I think many viewers would struggle to sympathise with a version of Seita’s character whose actions are based on self-preservation at the expense of Setsuko. Another key aspect of tragedy is that it ultimately brings the audience a feeling of catharsis. As upsetting as Grave Of The Fireflies is, I think it absolutely fufills this requirement because of how far it pushes the viewer’s emotions. Reading about Nosaka’s real-life experience upsets me, but it doesn’t bring me to tears. It just makes me feel horrible. I can’t blame him for writing an ‘idealisation’ of the story — how could one live through that and bring themselves to be able to represent it in all of its detail? Would Takahata have had the capability to represent an experience that harrowing? There’s something about that real experience that is too horrible to really give justice to in fiction. Tragedy becomes a retreat into something that makes sense. By bringing the logic of narrative into suffering, it becomes ordered and meaningful. In a strange way, tragedy is a kind of fantasy.

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I now turn my attention to In This Corner Of The World (2016), another film that focuses on the impacts of bombings on daily life in Japan during WWII. The film follows Suzu, a young woman who marries into the Hojo family. The film captures the family’s daily lives in Kure, a port city close to Hiroshima. War encroaches upon their lives, especially in the film’s second half where bombings and air raids become regular occurences. Because it’s an anime film set during WWII, comparisons to Grave were inevitable. Unsurprisingly, these comparisons are based more on surface-level elements rather than what the films are actually doing. If In This Corner Of The World were in live-action I’d doubt anyone would be making the comparison. I’ve still chosen to pair them up, mainly because of their differences rather than their similarities. The biggest difference is that In This Corner Of The World is not a tragedy. It obviously has several tragic events, but not only does it not fit into the tragic narrative framework, it actively resists it. As a result, it presents a different way of engaging with similar traumas.

One reason is its much broader tone compared to Grave. Grave has moments of happiness between the characters, such as a scene of Seita and Setsuko joyfully playing on the beach. Even this moment cannot last — the scene ends with Setsuko discovering a corpse, with Seita pulling her away. Grave’s tragic sweep constantly reminds the viewer of death and where the characters are ultimately headed. Because of these oppressive reminders of death and its causal narrative logic, Grave never settles into the rhythms of daily life. In contrast, In This Corner is a far more gentle film in its approach. In much of the first hour, the war is more the backdrop than the focus. The film sets up the warmth of its setting and family dynamics through an episodic structure. While the film uses stylised watercolour animation and the tone is overtly sentimental, the film admirably showcases wartime life as far more mundane than one would expect. One sequence early in the film shows Suzu’s attempts at cooking for her new family and trying to make the most of the rations given to them. She experiments with cooking the rice in a way that ‘blows up’ the rice grains and makes them larger, allowing everyone to have bigger portions. She proudly presents the results to the excited family, only for everyone to learn the hard way that the rice tastes terrible. While the episode emerges out of the circumstances of wartime, Katabuchi invests in Suzu’s cooking process — her joy in doing so, her need to show off, her hope to use it to validate her role in the family and the disappointment of the final result. With this sequence, Katabuchi creates a small story out of something as mundane as what Suzu cooks. While the sequence has obvious relevance to her characterisation, the level of detail invested into the cooking process shows an investment in that mundanity for its own sake. The film’s method here is to create an illusion that we are watching daily life — not characters who are fated by narrative, not a tragedy, but people with names and faces who lived their lives during the war like anyone else, and who were not defined by their victimhood. Grave portrays a world where the structures of life have collapsed, making it impossible for life to continue or go anywhere except towards death. In This Corner is about how life continues in spite of war, even as tragedy becomes a greater presence in life. The final hour of the film is where the most tragic events take place, but this does not mean these moments of warmth or mundanity suddenly end. Characters have to live with tragic events, and though they will be haunted by it, they are not defined by them.

The film’s most remarkable element is the way its tragic events are represented, both narratively and formally. This is especially evident in how the film portrays the bombing of Hiroshima. The bombing and Japan’s eventual loss of the war are the things about the film that are inevitable, and if the film were to take a tragic shape it could have made the bombing the climax or central point. This is the approach several historical films take. A recent example is Oppenheimer, which very much plays off our dread at the knowledge of the bombing, and positions it as the inevitable tragedy that everything in the film is leading up to. It made perfect sense in that film because it’s from the perspective of people whose actions had a direct causal relationship to the Hiroshima bombing. From the perspective of civilians, however, their relationship to the bombing wasn’t causal — there was no way they could have predicted or known of the bombing, and so it appeared as if it were completely random. Of course, the bombing is hinted at in In This Corner — a character mentions Hiroshima as a safer place to be because bombing campaigns aren’t being conducted there, and a comment like that obviously draws out some dramatic irony. However, the film never portrays Hiroshima as the endpoint that the film is ticking down to, or its characters as being fated to the whims of history. None of the main characters are in Hiroshima when the bombing happens, and the bombing does not have a causal relationship to the prior events in the narrative. It just happens.

In This Corner creates this effect by having the flash of the bomb appear in the middle of a conversation between Suzu and her sister-in-law Keiko. The characters experience a quake and witness the mushroom cloud from their home, but they are left completely unscathed. Suzu’s family are much closer to Hiroshima City, and this could be another source of tragedy, but the film does not turn it into a source of tension. Suzu is unable to get information about her hometown so she attempts to continue her life as it was, repressing her anxieties until she gets a letter from her older sister. When Suzu learns of her parents’ deaths several months after the end of the war, it does not come as a shock to her. It’s as if the reveal is simply confirming what she already knew. While the Hiroshima bombings are inevitable to the viewer, they aren’t treated in the story as such, and the narrative does not depend on the viewer’s outside knowledge. Tragedies in In This Corner aren’t the climax that the story’s been heading to all along, they don’t happen as part of a causal pattern, and they certainly don’t revolve around the characters. They are unpredictable and senseless. It’s this quality of the film that makes it so haunting. I think the film is ultimately more comforting than Grave Of The Fireflies in some ways and more depressing in others. This sense of tragedy is something that haunts me about the film — the idea that these things can just happen outside of our control, and we just have to keep on living with them. The continuation of life in In This Corner is simultaneously the film’s comfort and its terror. There are points in the film where Suzu wishes she could have been taken rather than living with survivor’s guilt. It seems cruel to be forced to keep going, but she must. The film ends with a sense that tragedy is no longer pervasive, but its effects still linger in life. When Suzu revisits Hiroshima she runs into numerous people who mistake her for a relative that they’re searching for. Their stories haven’t ended, and neither has Suzu’s. The endpoint of the film is a comforting one, but it doesn’t give the indication that order has been completely restored or that everything is ‘over’. Everything just continues.

Though aspects of In This Corner remain idealised (primarily its pastoral and nostalgic portrayal of life in its setting, which I’ll discuss more in the upcoming article) it lets go of the ‘idealised’ aspects of tragedy. It fits into a loose mode of storytelling that I will refer to as the “anti-tragedy”. These are stories that centre around tragic events but avert the narrative structure and techniques of tragedy as a genre. Some might do so intentionally and for others it might be unintentional. Here are some of the features of this mode:

1. The tragic event(s) are removed from a causal relationship to the prior events, or at the very least the causal relationship is de-emphasised. Tragic events appear spontaneous, unpredictable, and oftentimes pointless/difficult to make sense of, rather than being portrayed as an inevitable product of everything leading up to them.
2. The question of the story is not “How are we led to tragedy?” but “How does life continue afterwards?” These works often place the pivotal tragic event at the beginning of the story to emphasise this. While the tragic event leads to struggles for the character, it does not typically lead into more tragic events of the same scale. Instead the story focuses on how it lingers, and the challenge of processing such an event. This is typically done through further aversion of classical narrative structures, communicating the feelings of aimlessness and uncertainty that the characters experience.
3. The ending is not fully “closed” — characters may reach some catharsis, but there isn’t a sense that everything is “resolved” or that the lingering will completely end.

Essentially, the anti-tragedy attempts to reach a more realistic perspective by diverting from traditional narrative structures. I don’t want to position this mode as the ‘superior’ or more valuable one. I think there can be value in how tragedies offer a place for us to process and come to terms with suffering, and an ‘anti-tragedy’ film still might be distant from reality in some ways. The main point here is that they present different ways of representing traumatic events, and that tragedy as a genre brings us a strange amount of comfort in its certainty that real-world tragedies typically lack.