A Sober Film

Rating: 9/10 (14 August 2018)

I saw this film last night in a theatre as part of Studio Ghibli Fest. I had not been aware of it until yesterday although I have seen eight or nine Miyazaki films.
No, I was not tempted to cry and I was sad. I had been coincidentally reading yesterday someone's story about how grateful his father had been for the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about how despite continuing defeat the Japanese command would not surrender, and about how Eisenhower had decided to "fire bomb" the cities to stop the manufacturing of war materials. I don't know how much, if any, of this was true. I had never heard of the firebombing of Japanese cities until yesterday and here I was watching it in a movie.
I was sad because all I could think of was how many children had been killed by the Japanese the previous many years of war and, only because of that warfare, these Japanese children died of starvation. So, if the film is to convince one of the evil of ideological warfare, I was moved. It is often said that truly crazy people are not aware that they are crazy; this is how I think of that Japanese war of conquest.
Yes, yes, of course there are other frames of reference and everything I know could be wrong. I do know that this film shows both the culture that began the war and the tragic effects of that war. I thought of the children who died in Nanking, in the Phillipines, and in all the other places the Japanese military conquered. I think this is the complete effect of the movie--that war, for whatever virtuous reason, is crazy and that innocent people always suffer. The genius of this movie is that it shows us the faces of two very innocent lives that were destroyed by the craziness. For that, I rate it highly.