When I heard this movie was going to make me cry (and it did), I immediately thought: soap opera, weepie, melodrama. Though melodrama sometimes has a negative connotation to it—as in labeling someone melodramatic—I think there’s a time and place for every genre. And the time and place here—Japan in the waning days of World War II, beginning with the firebombings and ending with surrender—works perfectly for this type of film. The two best definitions of melodrama that I’ve come across are: (1) from the director Sidney Lumet, who argues in his book Making Movies that melodrama is the sort of drama that moves forward based on plot, which creates the events that move the action forward, rather than being “character-driven”; and (2) from a Western teacher, that melodrama is a “drama of the unsaid.” I think both of these definitions are applicable to Grave of the Fireflies, and it’s none the worse for it.
For the first definition, I think it’s important to note that the characters in this film are static, rather than dynamic, which is a good cue to melodrama: Setsuko remains a cute, gentle little girl throughout, and Seita remains strong, defiant and somewhat foolhardy. The big events are the loss of their house, the death of their mother, moving into the bomb shelter out of the aunt’s house, Seita being caught for theft, and Setsuko dying of malnutrition. As in most melodramas, you can see the plot twists coming from a mile away, and, as in the good ones, it doesn’t make a bit of difference. The plot twists are related to character, sure—other children, we think, might have gone back to the aunt, but not bull-headed Seita—but honestly this movie isn’t about how war changes people, as is the theme in many war dramas, but about how it kills them, even the little ones, which has much more melodramatic potential.
Now that I’ve begun thinking about it, I think the two definitions I had handy are actually quite complementary, and the second works as a deeper explanation of the first. Where dynamic characters are the heart of drama--their shifts in perspective moving the plot forward--dramas with static characters have to be based on something else, and that is what is withheld from them or what they withhold from others. When the unsaid comes to light it makes them either cry or act irrationally, in accordance with their narrow characterization, and much to our delight or misery, depending on how we feel about said characters. Right from the start, the film begins the tension of the unsaid, with the narrative itself withholding information from us the viewers: we see Seita die, but find out he had a little sister—what happened to her? The plot twists and subplots are also based on the unsaid, as in the case of the children’s mother: first, we don’t know what happened to her; then we know that Seita knows she’s dead, but is withholding this from his aunt and sister; then Seita, unable to bear it any longer, blurts the truth out to their aunt, whose attitude, if not characterization, changes immediately; Seita leaves with Setsuko, believing she doesn’t know, only to find out that his aunt had told her much earlier, unbeknownst to him. And, as I said earlier, at each point someone either cries or behaves irrationally—two counts of crying and two of irrational behavior for this subplot.
I think Grave of the Fireflies works so well because its melodramatic form is perfect for its subject matter—this is one of the cases, where, to present reality accurately, melodrama might be the only acceptable form. In war dramas, such as Apocalypse Now, people crack under the strain of war, whereas in war melodramas, such as Gone With the Wind, people persevere. The story of these children’s deaths in war might be truly impossible to present if, say, Seita had cracked and killed his sister. This, though it would be extremely upsetting, would ruin him for us as a sympathetic character and possibly destroy the whole meaning of the movie. A child dying in war is so far from any moral gray area, so unequivocally awful, that it seems natural, even correct, to line children up on the one side of good, without hesitation or movement, and war and everything that supports it on the other side as bad. And perhaps another characteristic of melodrama is this tendency to line everything up in black-and-white terms, as in All About Eve, where she’s evil and all the other characters are sympathetic. A child dying in war is perverse enough not only to make melodrama appropriate, but to make it the only dramatic strategy that’s ethical.
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