A richly affecting piece of Japanese animation, BAREFOOT GEN adapts a highly regarded graphic novel based on the author's experiences as a boy in Hiroshima, before, during, and after the city's atomic bombing.
On August 6th, 1945, a U.S. plane drops a single atomic bomb and devastates the city of Hiroshima. Gen, a ten-year-old boy, survives the blast, as does his pregnant mother, Kimie, but he loses his father, older sister, and younger brother. Kimie soon gives birth to a little girl, but her breast
milk dries up and the baby is threatened with starvation. Gen scours the city looking for food and milk and discovers some rice in a bombed-out storehouse. During this time, all of the boy's hair falls out.
Gen and Kimie set up house in an abandoned shack and are soon joined by Ryuta Kando, a little orphan boy who resembles Gen's dead brother, Shinji. Gen and Ryuta join forces and are hired to tend to Seijo, the badly injured brother of a wealthy man. After spending several days with Seijo, nursing
him and encouraging him to resume his painting despite his injuries, the boys are paid a hundred yen, which they use to buy a large supply of powdered milk. When they return home, however, they find the baby has died.
Within weeks, wheat appears to be sprouting in the fields again and hair seems to be growing again on Gen's head. Recalling a promise he'd made to his brother Shinji, Gen carves a ship out of wood and sends it floating down the river, bearing a paper lantern.
Originally released in Japan in 1983, and only now available in the US in an English-dubbed version, BAREFOOT GEN is unusual for Japanese animation (or any animation for that matter) in that it deals with real historical events and human drama rather than the more typical superhero and
science-fiction subjects. Based on artist Keiji Nakazawa's own experiences and adapted from his manga (comic book) of the same title, the film's detailed rendering of the land and cityscape is matched by explicit imagery of the devastation to people and property caused by the atomic blast.
An otherwise absorbing drama, it suffers in comparison to GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES, a 1988 anime feature focusing on two children orphaned by American firebombing, which offered a more poetic texture, an insistently gloomy tone, and a rigorous attention to detail. BAREFOOT GEN offers a surprisingly
upbeat ending, considering the lasting effects of Hiroshima's devastation, and is burdened with frequent and intrusive narration full of statistics and historical details. Still, it manages to tell a powerful and wrenching story which offers Americans a vivid dramatization of how the other side
suffered during this catastrophic event. (Graphic violence.) leave a comment