GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES

Junior Soprano (explaining why his crew has to attend funerals for people like the guy they murdered): "Fucking manners!"

Last night I saw the Studio Ghibli anime Grave of the Fireflies for the third time, at the Lightbox. Directed by Isao Takahata, it's a compelling story about two doomed orphans in Japan in the last year of World War II, still the most terrible of all wars, whose death toll includes millions of children. (I tried to make it a History Meetup event, but nobody else was interested.) I'm not spoiling the ending:  we learn of their deaths right at the beginning!  It sounds like a downer, and in some ways it is, but it's also very life-affirming in its details.  Animation can somehow depict such a story more powerfully than live action.

There's a scene near the end just after the little sister Setsuko has died--is her name a reference to Yasujiro Ozu's actress Setsuko Hara?--when a phonograph plays the song "Home Sweet Home" as we see a montage of brief moments of her while she was alive.  That song, of course, is a reference to Kon Ichikawa's Harp of Burma, about Japanese soldiers at the end of the war seeking atonement in music.  A cheesier movie would repeat moments we'd already seen, but these moments are one-time! 

I've seen the movie three times, and three times that scene has brought me to tears.  I guess that comes from the realization that the movie, which seemed to be about death at first, is really about life!  It left me with the thought that at the end of the day, love is the only thing we're left with.  The whole world should see it, especially Donald Trump.

Today I went to Mark's Work Warehouse near St. Clair and Keele to get a new sweater.  I got a light one because I have enough heavy ones. (They seem to be moth-proof.) I was hoping that Father would come with me, but he wasn't up to it so Moira came instead.  I hope he gets better so we can have a few outings like that:  he'll be 87 in a couple of months, and I don't know how much longer he'll be able to get out. I also got a big new bag of peanuts at the nearby Bulk Barn in the place where the stockyards used to be. (I visited that place just after it opened, and it still had a bit of a stockyard smell!)

Tonight I put on a spurt and finished Cannery Row.  Now I can focus on reading Don't Know Much About History for the History Meetup next month!