Shônenki

This is an interesting drama made just a few years after the end of World War II that looked at the toll the war effort took on some civilians, specifically this one family from Tokyo that evacuated out to the countryside during the last year of the war. The father is a professor and a pacifist whose liberal sympathies end up costing him his job. Icharo, the oldest of the three sons, is caught between his love for his father and his desire to fit in at his new school, which is becoming increasingly militaristic as the war gets worse for Japan. The movie is beautifully shot and has an elegiac tone. I particularly liked the soundtrack which featured lots of propagandistic songs which were used to ironically comment on the hardships suffered by the characters.

With the Allies raiding Tokyo, and father Chishû Ryû being laid off from his teaching position, the family is evacuating from Tokyo to a small village. Akira Ishihama doesn't want to have to make new friends, so he stays behind, for a while, submitting to mockery whenever he returns from visiting his family. Family his mother, Akiko Tamura, drags him out to where she doesn't have to worry about him being bombed. However, the people in the small village are contemptuous of the city, and Miss Tamura is wearing herself out while Ryû seems to spend all day and all night reading.

Keisuke Kinoshita's movie about an adolescent trying make sense of the last two years of the Second World War seemed to run a little long to me -- I could have done without the sequence of Ishihama in Tokyo -- a great cast, and a warm, humanistic story, taken from a novel by Isoko Hatano makes this a different story from Kinoshita's usual work. I am accustomed his anger, his scorn, his mockery of the militaristic government of Japan n the last days of the Second World War. Ryû's calm, thoughtful speech, when his son's resentment reaches the point of asking him why he spends so much time reading, is wonderful.

Kinoshita would not return to this warm vein very often. All too often, he would let the heat his anger determine the story. It's good to see that he could tell a different tale when he wished to.