In their highly resourceful Anime reference guide The Anime Encyclopedia – A Guide to Japanese Animation since 1917 (Stone Bridge Press, 2001), Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, comment on the criticism to which Mori Masaki’s animated adaption of Keijo Nakazawa’s manga Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen) has found itself a subject to.
They comment that whilst Barefoot Gen’s only shortcomings lie in the nature of the original material, and though the bombing of Hiroshima is the central event of Nakazawa’s life and work, the film cannot help but fall into a selection of vignettes once the initial aftermath has taken place. Since the eponymous hero of Barefoot Gen survives rather than succumbs to radiation sickness or deadly, searing burns, the use of vignettes often appears to depict the passing of time simply for its own sake.
The scenes in which the Enola Gay unleashes its horrific weapon upon the city of Hiroshima are unquestionably pivotal to Masaki’s film. That they occur less than a third of the way through Gen’s duration certainly highlights the problematic narrative path that the film may subsequently take. But regardless of the argued shape of Barefoot Gen, there is no room for criticism in the scenes of destruction themselves. In fact, this short and powerful sequence, less than six minutes long, remains the most memorable of Masaki’s film.
In this, the first of a small series of features that attempt to look at key sequences and scenes in separation from the films they belong to as a whole, I would like to draw attention to the sequence of events that effectively close one chapter of Barefoot Gen and set a contentious new chapter into motion.
The scene begins early on the morning of 6th August 1945 as three B-29 bombers take off from the US Tinian Base in the Mariana Islands. Later, Gen and his family busy themselves with their daily activities. His mother and sister Eiko attend to washing laundry, whilst his younger brother Shinji proudly shows his father a boat that Gen has made for him. An early air raid warning at 7.45 am brings everyone to a temporary halt, though they believe the threat has passed and that the overhead planes are simply reconnaissance craft. This is, in a sense, correct as they are, in fact, weather observation craft, but ones that will effectively seal the fate of Hiroshima’s residents. Gen’s father comments on the resultant sky trails, remarking “they’re very clear in the blue sky. It will be hot today”
Masaki exposits the visual code of the rest of the sequence with some mundane snapshots of early morning Hiroshima. A tram crawls over a bridge; a young girl clings onto a red balloon; people wait for trains; the Hiroshima Castle rests in the mid distance. Everything appears as it always has done. Though Kentarō Haneda’s sinister score lurks beneath these images, certainly lending a brooding menace…
Shinji spots a procession of ants hurriedly scuttling into their house, a strange panicky march of insects that will prefigure the aerial views of the city and its inhabitants from the American Bombers.
As with his Belorussian counterpart Florya in Elem Klimov’s terrifying Idi I Smotri (1985) Gen shares a strange relationship with the planes that hover in the skies above him – one of fascination and ultimate dread. Their sinister omnipresence, a mix of threatening proximity and abstracted distance takes hold. The animation treatment – deployed to characterize the anonymous pilots of the Enola Gay and so different to that which represents Gen’s world, only further serves the otherworldliness at play.
The craft itself is given a particularly interesting, ethereal and esoteric treatment. From the roaming cross hairs of the bombs firing device, the lilting cockpit and close ups of the cabin control dials, a poetic, circular theme is created that extends to the dropping of the “Little Boy” bomb and the subsequent mushroom cloud (one with a remarkable semblance to a poppy) that erupts forthwith.
It is the resultant action that garners the most discussion and notoriety. Colour is sun blasted away from the cells, a tinnitus ring takes piercing hold and Masaki’s animators leave a starched monochrome, apocalyptic landscape in the wake of Little Boy’s explosion. Gen’s movements are slowed to a stuttering plod. As he stoops to pick up a pebble he has dropped, the soundtrack dies completely. Then erupts into a riotous cacophony as the girl clinging to the red balloon is melted; an old man’s head falls off; a mother and her baby are reduced to a charred mess on the floor and a dog droops in the sagging railings of a microwaved balustrade. The colour is literally sucked from their bodies as they all perish.
Time and space are redefined in this section of the sequence. The earlier scenes of Hiroshima are recalled, sequentially, though now they are washed in the lurid hues of red and purple as the intense heat of the atom bomb reconstructs them to twisted, molten pieces. The trams explode, glass shatters and the Castle slops in on itself like a collapsed cake. All the while Gen continues to stoop to collect his pebble, the only difference now being the colour in which he is washed.
Gen’s family are crushed beneath the collapsing rubble of their home and he is flung across the screen as the mushroom cloud stretches up into the sky, taking as much of Hiroshima with it as possible. The billowing clouds undulate and reach further still, each eruption leaving a violent froth of smoke and recalling Hokusai’s Great Wave.
What makes this sequence so intriguing is surprisingly less connected with its own content per se or, indeed, its stylistic inclination. Instead, it is the distinction between it and that which precedes it that makes it so important. Clements and McCarthy may well chew on the bones of the narrative format of, say, Grave of the Fireflies as a preferred rubric. That Barefoot Gen elects to play with vignette in this sequence simply outlines the shape of the film as a whole. And in any case, Masaki does not deserve criticism simply because his protagonist survived the atrocity at hand. The reality is that time, its distortion and the structural caper of vignette are actually intrinsic in understanding the sum of all the horrible parts…
