Le tombeau des lucioles

Oral DnB version 2: Le tombeau des lucioles - “Pourquoi les lucioles meurent si vite?”

Hello, my name is Vicky LIU, I’m in 3rd1 class. Today for this presentation I will show you an important scene of a movie in images.

The film is The grave of the fireflies. It was produced by Isao Takahata and released in 1988. It is about the several events that led two children, Seita and his sister Setsuko to die during the war in Japan 1945.

Then comes the problematic: In which way the film succeeded to depict the children’s tragedy in wartime? Here is the summary, we’ll start with the biography of Takahata, the synopsis of the trailer, then a description, the analysis and finally the conclusion. I’ll start speaking in french at the graphic choices.

Takahata was born in 1935, graduated of French Literature at the Tokyo University. He entered the animation world in 1959 and talks about in his film war, having experienced it himself younger.. He finally died in 2018 as a film legend.

contexte:

Japan 1945, August, Kobe, the USA bombed the country and ravaged it. The country is literally in ruins. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians are victims of massive bombardments. And in the middle of that, there are the children.

So, The film begins with Seita dying on the platform of a train station. What happens then is a series of memories and flashbacks, a retrospective by his ghost of that war, of her death, of her mother’s death, and her sister’s.

To contextualize the scene, Setsuko and Seita live alone in an abandoned shelter. The scene is about the night when the children catch fireflies to light up their dark cave...

description:

For this first sequence, the children enter their shelter. At first,there’s only black, but Seita soon releases the fireflies, illuminating the space with a sea of small incandescent lights and touching their smiling faces. Takahata offers us a moment of pure magic, a parenthesis in this daily life of struggle. Yet, their glow eventually fades, slowly...

Then, the next moment, Setsuko digs a grave for the dead fireflies, and Seita remembers the lifeless body of her mother thrown into a grave. This dreadful image, with stunning realism, reminds the spectator of the harsh reality and the tragic fate that awaits Seita.

Then Setsuko asks this very symbolic question “Why do fireflies die so fast? ”. An overall plan looks at them, alone in the face of the world, the war in which the authors are the adults.

choix graphiques:

Un dessin animé tragique, c’est surprenant. Le tombeau des lucioles est en fait basé sur une nouvelle semi-autobiographique de Akiyuki Nosaka. Celui-ci ne désirait pas d’adaptation car un film ne pourrait suffisamment représenter avec réalisme la brutalité de son histoire.Mais Takahata déjoue ces contraintes avec l’animation. C’est une alliance de dessins réalistes et d'esquisses abstraites qui remplacent les acteurs et décors, de manière magistrale et aussi authentique que la réalité. Cependant, il ne se contente pas que de ça,

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