Barefoot Gen review

I’ve been striving to write more reviews for my blog, just to get my own words out there. Now, I’ve had five beers, but throughout the film I’ve been drinking water and I’m pretty much out of the proverbial woods of inebriation now.

Recently, I’ve had a lot on my plate and not enough time to do it. Reviewing anime and manga part time is becoming too full time and it’s only my own fault for that! But I’m glad to be doing it, because I like doing it. But for today, I’m reviewing Barefoot Gen from back in 1983 and 1986. 

There’s something insatiably interesting to me about media from a country that lost a war. In the 50s, America got a lot of comedy out of its entertainment media because we didn’t want to think about what we just went through (not that Americans went through more than Japan, but both countries gave up a lot). But Japan comes from a very interesting perspective. Japan is the country that lost the war—in fact, Japan surrendered unconditionally. Germany and Italy are the other two big powers that lost the war, but I don’t think they’ve created nearly as much entertainment media as Japan has over the years and certainly not as much about the war as Japan did.

Japan’s creators were influenced by the calamity they went through, moreso than Germany and Italy or any of the Axis powers. People like Akiyuki Nosaka, Keiji Nakazawa, and Shigeru Mizuki were so profoundly affected by the war and the post-war aftermath that they couldn’t help but write about it. And I couldn’t be more glad they did.

Grave of the Fireflies is the other well-known anime film about post-war Japan. Grave of the Fireflies follows Seita and Setsuko as they simply attempt to survive after their parents are killed. It’s about survival more than anything else.

While Barefoot Gen is undoubtedly about survival, it also takes a deep and dark look into what exactly an atomic bomb does to the people it hits. Having not lived in the era, never been through war, and been as detached for hardship as I almost possibly could be, the experience of simply watching it play out had a profound effect on me.

-----

I kind of went off the rails for a few days, and while these previous paragraphs were written Friday night, it is now Sunday afternoon and I have forgotten the flow I was in during the sleepless stupor at 3 in the morning Friday (technically Saturday). Let’s continue. 

Barefoot Gen doesn’t attempt to romanticize war, as we in the US often do in our film media. It doesn’t try to tell a sob story about the war-torn Japan. It tries to depict life as it was in the aftermath of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Not only this, it achieves something more. The Japanese are a proud people and when Japan didn’t surrender, the film depicts the people not directly affected by the bomb praising this decision (and even some affected by the bomb praising it). They didn’t want to “conditionally surrender.” They wanted to continue fighting as a country that had already lost its way and the war. Its people were suffering, but TWO atomic bombs had to stop it. That’s part of this depiction, of Japanese nationalism and loyalty. Some Japanese were ashamed, even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Japan surrendered. They can’t be seen surrendering, they need to be annihilated honorably (just read Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths for that depiction). But Gen, his father, and his family all agreed that if you discard honor for the sake of the life of people, it would be worth it.

That kind of selflessness is a running theme throughout the film. When they meet a burn victim later, Gen licks the burns and says, “These aren’t dirty at all.” These same burns that she’s been ridiculed about since she received them, Gen was embracing and accepting. It’s these kinds of acts that make the film so indelible.

But the film is about tragedy, and tragedy strikes Gen more than just Hiroshima. His sister is born in the ashes of the bomb, and his mother and he struggle to provide sufficient nourishment to her. Everything finally seems alright when Gen and newfound orphan and “brother,” Ryuta Kondo, care for a rich man’s brother, badly burned from the bomb. They received 100 yen and use it all to buy milk. But when they get home, they find that Gen’s sister has already died from malnourishment. These depictions of the war are what emphasize not just the immediate aftermath, but the aftermath days and months after the bomb hit. No one in Hiroshima or Nagasaki was able to recover except the rich, and everyone else was pushed to the lower class and given rations of rice porridge they were happy to have.

The one ray of hope Gen and Ryuta have is the wheat that’s starting to grow despite the fact that grass isn’t supposed to grow for 70 years after the bomb.

The second film picks up three years after the first, and features the aforementioned burn victim girl. The aftermath is only emphasized with the poisoned rain and lingering radiation sickness.

A striking part is the anti-American sentiment that the Japanese had after the bombings. This is, of course, to be expected after something like an atomic bomb, but it’s not something you immediately think of when you consider everything that surrounded Hiroshima/Nagasaki. The adults would look at their occupiers with scorn and wonder why they even needed to be there. Schools would teach, monotone, the rules of Japan’s unconditional surrender. And while the Americans likely got all the resources they needed, Japan’s struggling middle and lower classes were still starving.

Of course, the film can’t be complete without another tragedy. Gen’s mother, suffering from her own malnutrition and cancer, ends up succumbing to it all. Gen is now without any family left, and is kind of listless for a while. It’s only his orphan friends that allow him to grip reality again and continue on living.

These two films are some of the best depictions of a war-torn country I’ve ever seen, and one of the best World War II films I’ve ever seen. They’re also among the paramount anime of the 1980s. They’re a must-see for any anime fan interested in good cinema.