Les Enfants de la ruche

Children of the Beehive takes place in Japan shortly after the end of World War II. It is about a returning veteran who joins up with a band of orphans who then travel through the country looking for work. A story like this could either have been extremely downbeat or melodramatic, but this movie takes a middle path between those two extremes. While there are some sad moments, the movie never becomes maudlin or overly dramatic. On the other hand, the stakes never feel very high either and the story and characters could have been fleshed out a bit more. And an overly didactic speech by one of the characters detracts from the movie a bit. But overall, the movie is enjoyable and is worth watching if you can find it.

A repatriated soldier sees a gang of orphaned children at a railroad station. He shares his chocolate and bread with them, and takes most of them along with him as he goes in search of work and the only home he has ever known, a reform school where they taught him hard work, honesty, and respect for others. As they trudge along, he teaches them these things by example.

Hiroshi Shimizu directed 145 features and more than 20 short subjects in his career, from 1924 through 1959. Between 1942 and 1947, he made only three, and one of those was a part of an anthology film. He spent his time working with refugee children, like the ones portrayed in this film. He returned to the screen with this one, writing, producing and directing it, because he had something he had to say: hard work, honesty and compassion.

It is, in fact, a sequel to INTROSPECTION TOWER. That's where the soldier is heading. Although there are some standard melodramatic movie bits in this one, there are also some beautiful cinematic moments: a small boy standing at the shore crying "Mother!"; adults and children raking salt; people meeting in a devastated graveyard in Hiroshima; tall, bark-stripped trees falling in the forest; a small boy, another small boy on his back, climbing slowly and erratically up a mountain. Even more amazing, he did it with a cast of people who had never acted in a movie before.

Few of the actors ever worked again in the movies. Shimizu makes them all memorable.

Great slice of life film set in Japan following a group of orphaned children with a WWII soldier. The movie starts out cheery and optimistic, but the journey they go on has a variety of ups and downs along the way. Really solid stuff overall. Tackles good themes of the aftermath of war and also acts as a time capsule due to the very close events of WWII. I wish there were better visual quality versions of this.

8/10.

Shimizu Hiroshi, a director of poetic and deceptively simple "slice of life" dramas, had been interested about the psychology of children since the 1930's. One of his best-appreciated works of the decade was "Kaze no naka no kodomo" (Children in the Wind, 1937), an important work about the subject. During the war and the immediate post-war, he worked helping war-orphans, and this subject carried with him to "Hachi no su no kodomotahci" (Children of the Beehive, 1948), the director's most important work of the post-war period.

It's impossible not to make mental comparisons to Italian neo-realism while watching this film, product of another beaten-down nation. The state of the society is not the only similarity, but the film's usage of space, choice of a subject, and the usage of amateur actors all line with the more famous European works of the era. Shimizu's film follows an anonymous soldier returning from the war to the chaos waiting in the homeland. A group of eight orphan boys start following him around. As he journeys through Japan on foot, the boys help him in different ways. A substitute family of sorts is established, and we also get to hear about the backgrounds of the boys.

Shimizu's films often mess with your expectations, and this one does too. It starts off more optimistically than you would expect, though it eventually does manage to turn in a darker narrative. Near the beginning, the music is sunshiny, and the boys too are in a good mood. During the journey, the film's realism gets broken, due to the main characters having way too much food, and them sharing their food sources with others way too easily. Famine was a serious problem back then, but one kind of understands, that Shimizu, working under American censorship, did not want to stress this aspect too much. Instead, the film tries to give hope for people in a desperate situation. Another interesting aspect is that there are no girls among the gang, though Japanese childhood depictions in general (Ozu, Tasaka Tomotaka, Naruse Mikio, Gosho Heinosuke...) preferred to depict boys.

The darker side gets explored during the final third, when the characters arrive in Hiroshima. We see more ruins and devastation than I expected. The cinematography of the film really makes the most of the landscape, and at times the film looks like a documentary about the period it covers, even if some unrealistic elements are incorporated to the narrative.

The film features stunning images and a comforting communal spirit. Despite the gloom of the setting, the implementation is mostly up-beat, and the end result is a fascinating time capsule.