Anime: Hadashi no Gen

One of the defining features that molded anime as a medium used to be the raw depictions of violence and death. Unlike western cartoons which were seen as comedy skits or family-friendly adventures, anime could depict a lot more edgy material without restrictions. Even there, though there were still some topics the animators were having a hard time dealing with. Up until this movie the effects of the Hiroshima bombing on the people of Japan was a sort of taboo nobody was allowed to speak about openly because it was causing them big grief, plus the country was trying to recover from WW2 for a long time. They were still showing it indirectly through sci-fi in the form of Godzila, alien invasions, and huge robots leveling cities. They were their idealized fears and dreams, in a childishly understood way, masked through titles such as Godzilla, Mazinger, and Ultraman.

Eventually they got to be more direct about it (the actual bomb instead of giant lizards), and this is the first famous example. This movie is based on a very old manga, drawn by an actual Hiroshima survivor who experienced the whole ordel first-hand and created a highly dramatic depiction of the horror of the bombing’s aftermath. And he went in rather hard and symbolically since it is filled with scenes of utter gloom, death, suffering and complete human ignorance. It exists to make you feel nauseated through the suffering of survivors, rotting and dying like dogs. It is not entertainment in the sense you watch it to have fun. Don’t expect the Hollywood formula of most disaster/survival movies. There are no cool characters outrunning explosion bursts, jumping around severed electric cables and saving people in distress with mambo jumbo acrobatics, before the cavalry arrives to save the day with high tech helicopters and medicine supplies.

It is also not aiming to be miseryporn or body horror as many titles eventually end up being, since there is nothing erotic about the whole deal. I say that because most anime creators can’t help themselves and insert their fetishes in works that are meant to be pure tragedies and not deviant porn. I am looking at you, Elfen Lied, Akame ga Kill, and Made in Abyss, you overglorified goreporns.

The movie does a good job at showing how ignorant people were back then regarding radiation. Since the atomic bomb was used for the very first time in a civil area, people had no knowledge of it. They didn’t know the fallout would kill them if they remained around the bombed area. They didn’t know drinking contaminated water was instant death. They didn’t know the reason why their hair and teeth were falling off, or what was killing their babies. Heck, half of them didn’t even know how to read and write. Their ignorance makes this mess even worse and adds to the drama.

The movie also has its positive aspect, as it constantly shows the will of the protagonists to survive and find the courage to overcome all the obstacles they encounter, but that part is on the cartoony side of things, a weak aspect that is there just to mitigate the horror. If you know plenty about the survivors, you will know they were treated horribly by the rest of the Japanese, and suffered all sorts of diseases all their lives.

You would also know they were all a bunch of xenophobic, racist bigots because of the decades of propaganda they were being fed by the military. You don’t see that here; there is no mention of WHY the bombing took place. The people are presented like they do not care about the war, something that is a lie. The Japs were in reality quite cocky back then, since they were assured their army would conquer all of Asia. The bombing is depicted like it happened without a reason when in fact it happened because the Japs “had it coming” because of their overconfidence. Pearl Harbor was viewed as a great victory and not as a merciless attack on the most powerful nation in the world. All that is sweeped under the rug, resulting to the Japanese people being presented as victims in an unjust war they had no part in, and the Americans get a cameo appearance as generic villains without motivation. I never said it was a perfect depiction of how things were. Far from it; it’s just the first popular example.

Now come the negatives in the production. The animation is obviously dated and uses rather simple character figures, which can become hard for most spoiled-by-sakuga viewers to watch it. This ain’t Demon Slayer, it is crude-looking and a guaranteed pass if you haven’t been raised with old titles. Just imagine that the visuals in the original manga were twice as ugly. There is nothing cool about the animation, and it’s nowhere near the detailed artwork of Ghibli films when it comes to the slice of life segments.

Voice acting is generally terrible; the voice actors were no pros and the delivery of the lines can be jarring. The mangaka and original author not being the greatest when it comes to dialogues, but just a simple survivor who wanted to tell the story, is also part of the issue.

Sound effects are masterful at making you feel like life has lost its meaning with a few simple acoustic tricks. Eerie sounds, rumblings, moans and many similar creaks that give you the goose bumps.

The scene that pops out (literally) the most is the bombing sequence which is a nightmareish mindfuck of people deforming and then getting blown away to bits. If you are not used to such scenes, it can scar you for life. This is also a detriment to characterization, since that scene tends to completely overshadow the characters. Gen and his family are as simple as they can get, they never had much of a personality and they are just reacting to the bombing, thus the viewer ends up caring about what they are going through, instead of who they are. The terrible voice acting and their too-goody attitude is only making things worse.

As a whole, the movie is now more important for the history of the medium it is part of, than for its content. There have been vastly superior works with a similar theme in later decades, the most popular being Grave of the Fireflies and Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. It is more of a curiocity nowadays, since all its good points have been replicated and its bad points have been filtered out in other anime. It has its sick charm, but nothing about it can be considered a must-watch anymore.