everlasting true love, i am yours

but especially interesting to me is de Wit's analysis of how and why the film failed to realise Takahata's ambition to not just convey 'war is sad' but convey his critique of contemporary Japan in Seita's actions (here are two excerpts I found interesting)

and how that relates to subsequent 'war anime'...

i wrote about this subject last year after I saw Fireflies, comparing it with Gen and In This Corner; my post is like, ok, but of course it doesn't get nearly as far as Dudok de Wit does. but then he has been at the animation journalism and film crit thing a lot longer than I have. (also i was totally confusing Alex Dudok de Wit with Michaël Dudok de Wit, co-director of The Red Turtle, for a while there...)

In This Corner... doesn't get a mention here, but it seems that it is perhaps more typical of a genre than I realised. I'll pull out more whenever we get around to Giovanni's Island and - if I can find a copy! - Beneath the Black Rain on Animation Night.

so we would definitely expect some compromises with his grand vision. that said, Takahata was an infamously domineering director, to an even greater degree than Miyazaki - Mamoru Oshii once compared him to Stalin! - so it's hard to escape auteurism where he's concerned.

part of the context of the production is that Takahata's serious educational film was supposed to be a draw for Miyazaki's dubious proposition of a 'monster' film

so that probably has a large effect on the decisions Takahata made to change the story, remove the sexual imagery, etc. - this was supposed to be a film that could reach kids. (seems wild today that the serious war movie about starving to death was expected to appeal more to children than My Neighbour Totoro of all things!) in particular, one of the things the book portrays in the psychology of a teenager living alone with his sister in the middle of a war is incestuous feelings, which Takahata pretty much entirely cut:

though Mamoru Oshii was able to detect it anyway! from the above interview:

I have tons of things I want to say about Takahata-san, -laughs- but Grave of the fireflies attracts my attention most. That's an immoral world, since it's a story of incest. And the image of death is lined up right behind it. In that sense, it was an erotic movie, and it gave me chills.

this decision to cut makes a lot of sense since like, it's supposed to be watched by kids, not a literary novella for adults.

de Wit doesn't say a ton about the contributions of the rest of the team. he mentions that Takahata's storyboards were basically stick figures that were then fleshed out by other artists (a role that Miyazaki had famously played back on Heidi), and that there was a small argument between him and Miyazaki over which one would get Yoshifumi Kondou, who Takahata considered indispensible:

and he mentions here and there how backgrounds and colour design are particularly effective, but for the most part his account is focused on Takahata and Nosaka, particularly in the critical section at the end.

(storyboards that are basically stick figures aren't exactly uncommon in anime today lol, it's one end of a continuum with the other end being Kon whose hyperdetailed storyboards are almost layouts. but I think it's interesting that Takahata would be so uncompromising with his artists without learning to draw himself.)

it's definitely possible and even pretty common for a director to change their mind about what their film is Saying after the fact, often several times, and I guess we're lucky that Takahata never felt the urge to go back and make changes - not that he really could recreate the conditions it was made in now. both him and Miyazaki have had a growing streak of "kids these days..." and there's usually a peculiar gap between the tone of their movies and what they say about them.