Screening of the animated film “The grave of the fireflies” by Isao Takahata
The great Isao Takahata, co-founder with Hayao Miyazaki of the Studio Ghibli, adapted the semi-autobiographical novel by Studio Ghibli, adapted the semi-autobiographical novel by Nosaka Akiyuki, author destroyed by guilt for losing his younger sister in Japan in 1945.
Takahata, with enormous courage, rigor and sobriety, transforms that story into an animated film, creating the most tragic work of the epic of the Studio, if not of animation cinema as a whole.
The film presents a harrowing and intensely neorealist vision of the personal events of a boy and a little girl defenseless against the horror of war.
The raw realism of the narrative is just one of the elements that make The grave of the fireflies unique. The games of two brothers, immortalized in their precious innocence, contrast violently with the tragedy that surrounds them. That it is such, even more than for the war and its devastation, for the impact of this on the human soul: that it has lost every remnant of piety and altruism.
An exemplary work both as a manifesto against war and as a moral lesson on human nature. A poignant masterpiece, destined to accompany the viewer as a warning as cruel as it is precious.
