Recommended
I’m sure everyone who has had to endure mandatory secondary education has, at one point, been so bored that they entertained the idea of jumping out of the classroom window and to their death to escape their current obligations. For me, that intense level of boredom manifested itself every Thursday afternoon in my religious education class. Three hours of back-to-back religious study with a teacher who would frequently go on unprovoked tangents about her divorced husband and distancing relationship with her children. And the people who I was forced to sit with weren’t much better either. To my left was a girl who had hairso greasy that you could have fried eggs off of it for an entire city and to my right was a boy with such pungent body odor that during Winter I purposely tried to get a cold just to save my nose from drying up from the stank. To be fair, I wasn’t much better. During the time my acne was so bad that my face was essentially one large red crater which earned me the elegant nickname of, “period face”. The teenage years are the worst. However, I thankfully evolved from an unfortunate looking teenager to an unfortunate looking adult. But I’m getting off track now.
Nearing the end of one particularly slow and painful Thursday, the teacher opened up the class to a debate on the concept of a “just war”, asking that we assume the beliefs of various religious groups and their thoughts towards the concept. We used the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings of the Second World War as our case study. Regardless of your stance on this topic and whether you believe America was justified in carrying out the bombings, the significant thing is what happened next. We finished early, and, seemingly happy with our level of discussion, our teacher decided to end class with a small video from YouTube as a treat. We all relaxed and put away our things, content that the day was nearly finished and we didn’t have to do any more school work. The teacher dragged her big, meaty fingers over the keyboard and begun to click away. She turned to face the class. “This is a little animation I found on the Hiroshima bombings a while ago. It’s Japanese, I think”. I perked up. At the time I was beginning my never-ending downward spiral into the world of weebdom and, if memory serves correctly, I was in my early shounen phase. While I had seen my share of horror-themed titles, such as Another or Higurashi, both were admittedly grounded in a sense of unintentional hilarity. After all, the most memorable death of the former show involved a girl being killed by an umbrella. But we were all about to learn a lesson in just how well animation could convey death and suffering.
The teacher clicked play and, with the intensity of an elderly woman falling down the stairs laced with barbed wire, the entire class of young teenagers witnessed the Barefoot Gen Hiroshima sequence. First, a young girl holding a red balloon burned to death, her eyes melting out their sockets and slowly falling to the floor. Suffice to say her balloon did not survive. Next, an elderly man who burned so quickly his head was ripped from his body. And finally, a young mother, with her baby wrapped around her back, cradled the child as it fell to the ground, both frying as quickly as Harvey Weinstein’s career. Next came a dog, whose whimpers made some of the girls in the classroom squeal. After some shots of destruction and death, the bell sounded, the teacher closed the window, smiled and gestured that she hoped we had enjoyed what we saw. We got up, silent, and left.
Six years of therapy, twenty-four PTSD flashbacks, and eighty-nine sleepless nights later and I have finally sat down to watch this film in its entirety. Barefoot Gen is a 1983 Madhouse production based on the manga by the same name, penned by Keiji Nakazawa in the early 1970s. Based on the author’s own experience of having survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb, Barefoot Gen tells the story of a young boy called Gen and the fate of his family following said event and the subsequent defeat of the Japanese army. Barefoot Gen’s narrative is not complicated at all but it doesn’t need to be nor is this a point of criticism against the film. Undoubtedly the historical significance of the event is indeed a powerful one. Much like the Titanic, stories recounting events from the Second World War practically write themselves but to say that is to not imply that Barefoot Gen is hollow nor lazy. It doesn’t take much for someone to understand the emotional capacity and environment those must have endured during such a horrible time. Narratives such as Gen allow the viewer to be reminded of such horrible events and Gen is a film that certainly does not pull any punches in this regard.
The film’s main framing device, that of a narrator who occasionally returns at important interludes in the timeline of this piece of history, gives the film a documentary feel. By doing so it can be argued that the film’s main goal is that of education. But the narrator also serves another purpose, at least thematically. Much of Gen’s narrative is told from the perspective of Gen himself. Children are developing constantly and find it far more difficult than adults to understand complex situations or even really the world around them. Gen has a surface level understanding of the war. He can identify the types of planes he sees in the sky as well as the fact that he and his family have a lack of food because of the war. But to Gen, the war is nothing but a general concept; he doesn’t understand much else. When walking past people waiting for food, Gen observes two men who begin to bicker and fight about their placement within the line. Gen laughs and comments that it is silly that grown men will fight over food as children do, misunderstanding the extent to which people have been starving to even get into that kind of situation in the first place.
When faced with the harshness of reality, Gen and his little brother, Shinji, have very childlike and innocent responses to it. For example, their heavily pregnant mother becomes malnourished so the two children ponder how they can help. They first think about feeding their mother caterpillars but quickly give up on the idea when they imagine that if she ate them, she too would turn green and hairy. They then decide to steal a Karp since their neighbor told them that eating one would replenish her health. After being caught by a man who presumably owns the pond in which they stole the fish from, they plead and cry for ownership of one. The man agrees and their mother recovers some of her vigor but later the same man visits their house to speak to their father. Thinking they have been caught the children run away, only to reluctantly come home again, waiting to be punished by their parents. Instead what awaits them is a loving embrace and they are given a small present in the form of candy for their efforts. Gen’s childlike response and naivety to such a predicament wins out. But not for long for the harshness of reality reminds him that the world is a cruel and unforgiving place. Every moment of happiness Gen experiences or every moment in which he believes his predicament to be improving are immediately undercut by the evil of the world. Gen’s innocence is tainted by the war and no matter how hard he tries he cannot escape the fact that he is but a child living in war-time Japan.
The narrator only serves to emphasize this. By informing the viewer of the number of deaths the bomb succeeded in taking or any other information just as morbid, it drives to undermine Gen’s childlike naivety to complex situations. With each passing moment, Gen’s innocence is being lost. Even the end of the film leaves a bittersweet feeling. While Gen flourishes in the fact that his hair is growing back and life is returning to the soil, the viewer is still left with the uncomfortable death of an infant just minutes prior. On one hand, it serves to remind the audience that indeed hope is certainly alive but it is one founded on an uneasy ambiguity for the future.
Gen’s narrative is deeply rooted in historical events that the film plays to its advantage. Everyone knows that the day the atomic bomb will fall is slowly coming. As a time, ticking bomb, each day only serves as a reminder that it is inevitable. Even viewers unfamiliar with the historical context of this film will certainly realize that something is coming. That something is indeed wrong. While in a bunker during an air raid, Gen’s father remarks that it is strange that Hiroshima has not been as thoroughly attacked as neighboring cities have and Gen observes that the American planes flying ahead are scouting planes and not attacking ones. This is what makes the scenes leading up the bomb drop all the more powerful. The family, despite being in such harsh conditions on the edge of starvation, all retain a sense of drive and motivation to continue and live on which is certainly admirable. Many small moments give the characters a wonderful sense of depth and humanity. This is most felt between Gen and his brother, Shinji. As young boys in close age, they are very close and spend much of the earlier parts of the film fighting as brothers would normally do, both sharing their childlike naivety to help their family.
Another interesting plot element arises from Gen’s father who is reluctant to sing the praises of the Japanese army and thus is treated as an unpatriotic outsider. Barefoot Gen is critical of the nationalistic ideology that was rampant in Japan at the time which called for soldiers to sacrifice their bodies in war, and for women to give birth and multiply for the preservation of the Emperor and the Yamato race. While this is done narratively, there are other moments that point towards a critique of Japanese nationalism. Such an example is when the audience is introduced to Gen for the very first time. Walking out of a bunker, Gen stands triumphally at having survived another day, with his family standing close behind him. The “camera” is placed at a low angle to emphasize their stature. They all stare off up into the sky above, at their enemy, strong, brave, and confident. This type of framing feels like it would fit right at home on any number of Japanese wartime propaganda posters that would call for the family unit to play their part and be strong. But this moment is undercut when Gen’s stomach rumbles. Despite being brave and confident, what the Japanese people desire most of all is not victory but indeed just something to eat, undermining the concurrent Japanese government. But then the day finally comes. I was somewhat taken aback by how anxious I felt when I knew these characters would soon be meeting their demise. In only thirty minutes the film does a great job of acclimating the viewer into the world of this small family.
The bombing sequence is certainly the centerpiece of the entire film and while I did touch upon it earlier there are several other things about this sequence, I would like to draw attention to. The first thing is how the sequence does such a great job of creating tension. There are small things that seem off. A plane is spotted in the sky, the Enola Gay, which Gen’s father cites is here remarkably early. Gen’s family notices that hundreds of ants are crawling inside their home through the front door. Even the way the shots are ensembled and paced gives off a sense of danger and uneasiness. After an ensemble of wide-shots depicting Hiroshima and its citizens' daily life, ambivalent towards the danger that is about to befall them, the audience is given the time. It’s ten minutes past eight in the morning. Time is slowly running out. The film cuts to the American’s point of view; their faces are different than how the rest of the characters in the film are presented. By doing so it emphasizes that the Americans are a significant “Other” than that of the Japanese. Their impartiality and passiveness about what they’re about to unleash are evident. The bomb is dropped. A final look at the clock: it’s now a quarter past eight. It’s over. The music cuts out and all that remains is silence as a bright white illuminates the citizens. The only thing left is to watch in horror.
While it has been over six years since I had originally watched this sequence and what I say is mostly in jest, it is undeniable just how cold this sequence is and just how well it is all made. The pacing, the editing, it’s all done to fantastic effect. But despite how horrific this initial melting sequence is, the moment that I feel is more powerful comes after. Having survived the blast, Gen is left to frantically wander the destruction before eventually coming face-to-face with the remains of the Japanese people. Men and women; their skin melted and hanging off their body; their eyes hanging from their sockets; their bodies impaled with pieces of broken glass. The most haunting thing about this sequence is how these people walk in which they still retain an element of humanity under their melted and torn bodies. A young child grips onto his mother’s dress. Another mother holds what remains of her melted child within her arms. A sister and brother walk hand-in-hand as the latter cries into his arm. It’s genuinely unnerving and one of the most powerful scenes in anime. And from this point forward the film is relentless in terms of its imagery, even going as far as to depict babies lying dead and charred on the ground. Even the way the sounds of the survivors, and how they all group together, sitting, staring into nothingness as they fill the air of with the sound of their pain, always left such an impression on me. It’s something straight out of a horror film. The shading, the lighting, everything about this scene is both poignant and mesmerizing.
Barefoot Gen is a gorgeous looking film and the choice of colors for many of the backgrounds are bold and distinctive with its use of red, purple, and orange. When the bomb goes off the characters are trapped within a bright inferno. Streaks of red, orange, and blue rain down in the background, demonstrating the transformative power of nuclear energy. In depicting the immediate aftermath, the sharp contrast between the raging fires and dark mushroom clouds is also a visual highlight, dividing the frame, creating an all-encompassing hell. The subsequent radioactive rainfall, while being important to the narrative, is also highly cinematic and only enhances the horror that has befallen this city. Likewise, the animation retains both a lot of horror and charm. Many of the early sequences in the film before the attack are incredibly well animated. Gen and his brother move around with grace and the animation is bouncy to complement it. Every frame in which they play together has some level of interesting or dynamic movement to it and there are many impressive sequences throughout. The character designs feel distinctly “Tezuka”. Characters, especially children, feel more “western” cartoon than distinctly “anime” with their round, squishy faces. The design of the characters feels largely influenced by the general aesthetic style of the 1960s, and, you’ll have to excuse me if this sounds misguided for this decade is one I am not too versed in. Perhaps this is because the manga began publishing in the early 1970s, but either way, what I wish to communicate (and which I am doing a poor job of) is that the style of this film feels distinct and memorable from someone more accustomed to a more modern style of Japanese animation.
Barefoot Gen is an incredibly beautiful – yet devastating – account of the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima. It pulls absolutely no punches, serving as both a visual and educational reminder of the horrors of war. Gen, as well as the rest of the cast, are not exactly the most developed, or fleshed out or deep or anything else like that, which many people are looking for in terms of anime, but that’s fine. What these characters represent is more than enough as is. There are still many things that I wish to talk about so I feel this review is pretty barebones and I want you to know that too. Aside from being able to write about another anecdote from my stupid life, Gen is a film that packs a punch the less you know about it. Barefoot Gen is a simple story told extremely effectively. Some may say this film is more style over substance but those people can suck my micro dick. Barefoot Gen is something I would highly recommend to any film or animation fan. While it is not the most polished rock in the bag, it is the most interesting.
Oh and one final thing Barefoot Gen is better than Grave of the Fireflies I will fight you all.
