Grave Of The Fireflies And Pride

Aaaah, Grave Of The Fireflies. A beautiful but very heavy movie. One of my favorites of all time and my favorite war movie of all time. Considered by many to be one of the saddest, if not, the saddest movie ever.

While Grave Of The Fireflies is mainly known for being a story that shows how terrible war is as it took the lives of not just soldiers but also innocent people, I wanna talk about something different.

I am focusing on how Grave Of The Fireflies talks about the idea of pride but first, some context.

In world war 2, America threw 1 bomb in Hiroshima as a way of stopping the war but costing thousands of innocent lives. However, Japan refused to give up due to honor and because of that, America threw another nuclear bomb in Nagasaki, taking even more thousands of innocent lives.

And how does this relate to Grave Of The Fireflies? Well, as we can find in the story, one of the reasons why both Setsuko and Seita fall in the end is because of pride. The honor.

You see, Setsuko is meant to represent innocence in the story. Seita is meant to be grown up take care of Setsuko and fight the most in their situatuon. However, his pride to keep his honor of handling the situation in a time of war is what costs her life. This is evidenced through the advice that the farmer gives to Seita when he is lacking in food. He explicitly says to him to suck up his pride and go back to his aunt so they can help them but of course, Seita refuses and he keeps holding on to his honor to take care of Setsuko by himself and not be a "parasite" in the eyes of his aunt.

His aunt's pride is also somewhat responsible for the death of Setsuko. Not exactly intentionally, maliciously or directly but it is what leads to both Setsuko and Seita leaving and dying outside. Her pride is her idea that the military are doing their fighting and she uses it as a way of showing that he does not deserve to get food and stay with her. Not to mention that both Seita and Setsuko are being parasites since they are not bringing much to the table even though they are both just children and have lost their mother and home. Since she is actually the one who is providing the roof and food, she can force those words on them and tell them they are being ungrateful. And when Seita actually cooks for himself and his sister, she becomes offended.

Both led them to die outside in a time of war and both indirectly caused the death of a innocent girl.

In a way, it is a microcosm of how Japan's pride lead them to their demise and the death of the innocent (or at least, that's how I interpret it.)