Forum - View topicBarefoot Gen - "enjoyable?"
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ailblentyn
 Posts: 1688 Location: body in Ohio, heart in Sydney |
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What do people think of "Barefoot Gen" as a viewing experience?
I was just thinking about it today, and realised that while I was properly impressed and sobered by seeing it a few years ago, it's not a film that I have any desire to have in my collection, or even watch again to be honest. I think of viewing it as being much more of a "good-for-me" experience than an enjoyable one... something like medicine... or something an elementary school teacher with a social conscience might have forced the whole class to watch one Friday afternoon. And made us cry. (Contrast with "Grave of the Fireflies", which I find dramatically satisfying, and which I get much pleasure for re-watching and thinking about.) Am I being unfair? |
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5124 |
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This sounds like a question that could very well be asked of Now and Then, Here and There.....
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ailblentyn
Posts: 1688 Location: body in Ohio, heart in Sydney |
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Quite true! And yet loads of people adored "Now and Then,Here and There"... Maybe I'm just too delicate. 
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18264 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Barefoot Gen (and to a slightly lesser extent its sequel) is one of the rare anime out there that you watch to be informed, not to be entertained. It doesn't make an argument or try to dramatize anything; it just lays out there an example of what has happened for viewers to react to or not. To this end, it works very well. It isn't something that I'd want to rewatch, though, as I found certain parts of it very difficult to sit through the first time.
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Barefoot Gen 1 was not entertaining, and it was not informative it was bad. I rated it as Weak, and here is what I wrote about it:
Yes, I am giving this movie a grade this bad. A grade which is perfectly justified in my opinion. Let's start with Gen's voice. It was simply abysmal. The Seiyuu, who was just a kid, wasn't good at all and shouted most of his lines in a horrible and irritating voice. Kids can be rambunctious, but for heaven's sakes they don't speak like that. At least he was the worst (the others could hardly have eclipsed him), although as the titular character he was the most important role. One thing everybody expects when reading about Hiroshima is a depiction of the actual bombing. And unless you are shown actual footage then what you are watching is someone's interpretation. "Ah," I hear you say. "The director was actually there. He knew what it was like". But he didn't. He was just a child after all. A stone wall wouldn't have protected him as well as it did given the events happening around him, and how close he must have been to the epicentre. The progression of the symptoms was not correct. The way Gen lasted so long before rapidly losing only his hair was not accurate. Basically, much of the depiction of the bombing and the aftermath was at least partially inaccurate and riddled with mistakes. People do not instantly die from drinking fatal quantities of radioactive water; unfortunately it is much slower than that. Another mistake I noted was that the bomb detonated only seconds after being dropped instead of the forty-three-second-delay, which is clearly wrong. That mistake should never have come up if the writers had done their basic research. But the biggest problem I have with the movie is how it did such a great disservice to the dead. The movie tried hard to get us to like his family, and by and large it did. But I'm talking about the wider dead. It turned the walking dead into mindless zombies (as opposed to the Einstein strain of zombies). It might seem like a logical choice to make, but it dehumanises the dead, making their suffering seem trivial. Sure, with their eyes burnt out of their sockets and their mouths fused shut they would have looked like zombies, but to completely show them without humanity is one artistic choice I cannot agree with. Also, when Gen met the dying soldier it was treated almost comically. "Hah, his hair is falling out. Oh, he's pooped his pants. Oh no, he can't stand up". Not only is this not how radiation sickness progresses, but it mocked the victims of Hiroshima, something I'd thought would be the last thing the movie would do. This movie was a huge disappointment. It barely touched on the foreboding aspect, the bombing sequence was like what I'd imagined being under the influence of LSD would be like, and the movie absolutely did not handle the aftermath well. It was crap. Barefoot Gen 2 was far far better. It had its faults, but it worked. And there were some very touching scenes. I rated it as Very Good, and this is what I said about it: Well this movie was a heck of a lot better than the previous one, that's for sure. Without the weight of expectation that comes with depicting the bombing itself, this movie was far more natural and flowed really well. What I thought was going to be a tired plot about street youths surprisingly turned into a rather sentimental and emotional story about survivors suffering all over again by the actions of their own countrymen. The movie nicely covered the discrimination and mental and physical scars that they faced, as well as how they dealt with their predicament. Gen's voice sounded too old for a nine-year-old boy but at least it was a far better performance than from the first movie (although it couldn't have been much worse). The movie did look noticeably better, and I was never distracted by the quality of the visuals, although I did experience lag between the audio and video. You don't need to have watched the first movie to enjoy this one, and in fact I recommend that you don't bother with the first at all. |
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nobahn
Subscriber Posts: 5124 |
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I saw it -- once -- on the "Syfy"/SciFi" channel  . No, you're not "too delicate".
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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I have been unfortunate enough to accidentally witness the bombing scene from this film, as a result of clicking a video link without being previously informed of its content. As somebody who does not enjoy being horrified, I can only hold the experience in an unappreciative light.
Perhaps unlike dtm42 however, I have nothing to say against the historical or scientific accuracy this sequence may have lacked. Naturally, the separate issue of whether or not the film is respectful to victims is something I am not in a position to speak upon. Indeed, this is not a position in which I wish to place myself, for doing so would require being subjected to the film's horrors again. |
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ailblentyn
Posts: 1688 Location: body in Ohio, heart in Sydney |
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I want to disagree with Key, and also with dtm42.
Firstly, @Key. Maybe "enjoyment" could never be the right word to describe an appropriate experience of a film that tried to cover the subject matter of "Gen", but surely the film invites appreciation in ways that go beyond "informing". It is a fictional narrative rather than a documentary. And even if the narrative is only at the service of exposition, its success as a narrative is going to be significant in the success of the whole. So questions like how believable the characters were, how the drama was developed, use of symbolism (all things that might lead to narrative "enjoyment") are on the table, I think. Maybe I felt the fiction was too transparent to make me forget that the film was a sermon, which in turn made the sermon less emotionally effective. 
@dtm42. I have to say I interpreted the images you saw as disrespectful to the dead completely differently. I did see dehumanisation, but took that as an objective dehumanisation by the bomb rather than a matter of the film's representation. I remember once seeing a documentary about the development of the H-bomb where someone said the obscenity of these weapons was that they treated "man as matter". (Maybe it's a famous quotation. This was a long time ago, and I can't remember who the speaker was.) I took it that the makers of "Gen" were saying something similar: that the blast stripped away humanity and turned people into walking meat, and that that was obscene. |
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wanderlustking
 Posts: 449 Location: Bozeman, Montana |
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I can't think of very many movies that fit into this category; I didn't "enjoy" the movie, but seeing it was still a powerful experience. In my mind Barefoot Gen doesn't really fit the bill.
Maybe I'm just old, but I tend to agree with DTM about these kinds of movies. There is a certain point at which trying to hard to be "harsh" and "poignant" only distract from the emotions your trying to display. |
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Sanosuke_Inara
 Posts: 1662 |
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Well, Barefoot Gen is something that I've been meaning to invest into for a while now--caught my interest in a ANNcast not too long ago. Hearing all of you speak about it this way, though--saying that the bombing scene horrified you and is apparently one of the more brutal things you'll see in anime makes me wary of checking it out. I'd probably be able to appreciate it for what it's trying to convey, but whether or not I actually want to see something as horrific as you make it out to be is the problem.
I'll see it someday, I'm sure. Don't know if that'll be anytime soon, though. :/
Speaking as somebody who owns the DVD for NT, HT and has watched it numerous times, I can definitely see how many people may find it too harsh to experience more than once, even though they do respect as a great series. I personally don't fit into that group, though. Now and Then, Here and There is my favorite anime series of all time--for me, the tragedy of that series is one of it's many strong points, and one of the reasons that I hold it so dear. For me, the raw emotion it evoked from me is something that I haven't experienced with most other anime, and even to this day I can't watch that series without being emotional driven(which, imo, is a definite plus for the series). Still, I understand that others may not be able take it as well as most others. |
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