Audience reviews
20 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
ThatAnimeSnobRE
One of the defining features that molded anime as a medium used to be the raw depictions of violence and death. Unlike western cartoons which were seen as comedy skits or family-friendly adventures, anime could depict a lot more edgy material without restrictions. Even there, though there were still some topics the animators were having a hard time dealing with. Up until this movie the effects of the Hiroshima bombing on the people of Japan was a sort of taboo nobody was allowed to speak about openly because it was causing them big grief, plus the country was trying to recover from WW2 for a long time. They were still showing it indirectly through sci-fi in the form of Godzila, alien invasions, and huge robots leveling cities. They were their idealized fears and dreams, in a childishly und…
Read at the sourceRei_approves
Barefoot Gen opens showing the carefree yet equally tough lives of Japanese children of the 2nd world war. This is from the perspective of Gen and his family where food is scarce and Gen's mother is pregnant with a 4th child. However, most of the audience will be aware of what is lying in wait for Hiroshima which the film tries to remind you of at certain points of this waiting period. This is what perfectly builds the tension as you can guess (or at least I hope you can guess) that their lives will be sent into misery. The anime does not hold back and has one of the most harrowing nuclear bomb scenes that is seemingly realistic with the decay of lives humans and the pure horrors they are feeling shown through a memorable yet extremely disturbing visual sequence. As well as the momentary d…
Read at the sourceLIQfilms
I’m sure everyone who has had to endure mandatory secondary education has, at one point, been so bored that they entertained the idea of jumping out of the classroom window and to their death to escape their current obligations. For me, that intense level of boredom manifested itself every Thursday afternoon in my religious education class. Three hours of back-to-back religious study with a teacher who would frequently go on unprovoked tangents about her divorced husband and distancing relationship with her children. And the people who I was forced to sit with weren’t much better either. To my left was a girl who had hair so greasy that you could have fried eggs off of it for an entire city and to my right was a boy with such pungent body odor that during Winter I purposely tried to get a…
Read at the sourceMakingAList
Barefoot Gen is one of THE war films to see.
If you thought Grave of the Fireflies was brutal, watch this. Don't let it's "cute" artstyle fool you. It contains gross, graphic, heart-wrenching scenes throughout the film. Scenes that show the true horrors and hardships of the Japanese people after the bombing of Hiroshima, written from the personal experiences of a survivor himself. The part where the bomb is actually dropped on the city is my favorite depiction of the bombing from any film. (However, I'll admit I haven't seen too many war films.) It isn't for the faint of heart. And that's one of the reasons I love it. There's not much it's afraid to say or show, even about the different ways in which Japan mishandled the whole situation. This movie shows you how it really was and drives ho…
Read at the sourceOptigisa
This movie talks about, shows and documents to the viewer the harsh reality of the Japanese people living in Hiroshima during the year of 1945. Now where have I seen this concept done before? That's right. This movie was so influential to the point where it influenced Studio Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies. When you influence a studio as illustrious as Ghibli, you must be doing something right at the very least. Barefoot Gen did many things right to say the least.
The movie opens up on a bright note, beginning with a father and his two boys, Gen, the protagonist of the movie, and Shinji, his younger brother. The opening of this movie is so positive to the point where I was bobbing my head to the catchy opening song, and thinking "Yup, this is definitely going downhill from here."
It beg…
Read at the sourceVaenny
War reaps benefit to no one. It does not prove who's right, only who's left. And i understood these sayings even more when I watched this film. Barefoot Gen was an eye-opener, especially to the young generation who had never experienced war.
Now, I understand that this is a very old film (as proven by the art on the cover), but if you look past that, you'll see that the story, characters and emotions emitted by each of them are timeless and undying. Not only did it serve as the message that war brings hell on earth, but also showed the reality of history: that these events did happen and that people suffered greatly.
But underneath that darkness and despair laid a small ray of hope: that being Gen himself. He emitted so much hope despite living in a relentless environment. When everyone…
Read at the sourceliteraturenerd
Overview:
Barefoot Gen is in my opinion one of the most underrated anime on this site. In the West, it is completely overshadowed by Grave of the Firefly, which is unfortunate because in many ways Gen is actually the superior film! In this review I will be not only looking at Gen, but comparing it to its much more famous and critically lauded brother Grave of the Firefly (Hotaru no Haka).
SPOILERS!
Pacing and characters:
Barefoot Gen opens by showing the main character, a little boy named Gen, along with his family. Gen has a little brother named Shinji, an elder sister Eiko, a father, and a mother who is currently in the late stages of pregnancy. Barefoot Gen shows the family trying to keep their chins up and appreciate the small joys left in life despite the food shortages and the l…
Read at the sourceDr_Spade
Gen is a little boy who lives in Hiroshima in Japan along with his father,little brother,Shinji,elder sister,Eiko,and mother,Kimie,who is pregnant and about to give birth soon.The backdrop is the ongoing Second World War and the year is 1945,the year the world came to a still.The city of Hiroshima is suffering from severe scarcity of even basic food like rice and also medicines and other such necessary commodities of life.Even then,Gen and Shinji are two boys with magnanimous spirits who live life king-size even in the face of adversity.They were a happy family with every one taking care of the others and working hard together to make ends meet.The common goal of the other members of the family was to look after Kimie,Gen's mother,so that she could painlessly give birth to a healthy baby.…
Read at the sourceSporadicToast
The problem with textbooks when they talk about the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they lack description of what really happened. Usually it just says the "bombing which ended the Second World War" but doesn't get more in-depth than that. What I love about Hadashi no Gen is that it shows the bombings to the perspective of a person living there. So you could correlate and feel empathy to each other.
Basically, this movie makes it feel like your own hometown was bombed the atomic blast, what would you feel of that?
From the disastrous air raids before the bombing, to the lone bomber that dropped the bomb which ended the war. From the seconds after the appearance of the mushroom clouds, to the broadcasted capitulation of the Empire of Japan, this is a show that truly showed the…
Read at the sourceNeonKazma
Barefoot Gen... Well, what can I say? It's one of the most important anime films in history, along side with Akira. It became famous for it's dark and brutal take on the bombings of Hiroshima, which was based on the manga by Keiji Nakazawa who wrote this manga based on his experience as a Hiroshima survivor when he was 6 years old and it is still the most harrowing experience ever witnessed on an anime film.
Barefoot Gen takes place in Hiroshima, as we see Gen and Shinji live with his family and working their very best to help them in a time of need, since the bombings destroyed half of Japan's cities in the war. Gen and their family lived the good life until that fateful day when the bomb, created by American WWII scientists, was dropped in Hiroshima and everyone got burned through radia…
Read at the sourceggultra2764
Barefoot Gen paints a realistic and graphic look at the damage to Hiroshima during and after the dropping of an American atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. The movie doesn't hold back any punches in depicting the horrific reality of the situation as homes are destroyed; hundreds of thousands of people are either dead, homeless or suffering serious health problems from the radiation of the bomb; military personnel are around to pick up corpses and tend to those who can be saved; and water and food supplies are contaminated thanks to radiation exposure. Seeing villagers being fried to a crisp from the atomic bomb and the countless burnt corpses in the aftermath made for some of the most disturbing material I've seen in an anime and this is saying something when I've seen titles like Elfen Lied a…
Read at the sourceDonwun
Note: In this review I will be talking about both Barefoot Gen (1983) & Barefoot Gen 2 (1986) in every respect even though there is a 3 year gap in production between the two movies I don’t really feel there is much of a difference with anything in particular. In many ways both films would have worked better a single release. This would have made more sense as the two movies address two different aspects of the given situation. Also considering the subject matter is quite difficult for many to digest I actually feel having the two films separate has hindered the second movie.
Using animation to tell this somewot autobiographical account of the Hiroshima disaster personifies the unique tool animation can be to tell a story. Although stories like this which are based on true events will al…
Read at the sourceBlueGuitar
Warning: As Hadashi no Gen is extremely graphic, it is not to be viewed by the faint of heart.
First off :-
What tugged at my heartstrings the most:
The scene where Gen's mother lost control of her senses as she watched her husband, daughter and youngest son perish in the flames.
The madness brought about by this atomic bombing truly was horrifying, and through this movie, I was given a little insight of what life was like for the survivors.
Though the atomic bombing did end the war, what really stunned me was the fact that the dunces of war leaders involved took way too much time to finally hang up their 'pride' and admit their defeat. The movie producers depicted this shock perfectly through the doing up of a scene whereby Gen's mother learnt of Japan's surrender, and her subsequent…
Read at the sourcezozobra
Based on the manga of the same name and centred on author Keiji Nakazawa’s childhood exploits in post-atomic Hiroshima is Barefoot Gen, the classic anime directed by Mori Masaki. The crux of the story is centred on the suffering caused by the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It expands the story beyond the immediate and devastating effect to show how people were affected by the fall out of one of the most monstrous man-made disasters ever. Issues that affect the survivors are varied from the brutality, bullying and negligence of occupying American forces. But much more seriously it focuses the cameras gaze on the long term affects of living in the shadow of such a disaster, the horrid and slow death that Pika brings, a disease which eats away at the body . This all results in children being or…
Read at the sourceYxel
I can sum my Barefoot Gen experience up in one word: ANNOYING.
It was so damn annoying! I was ripping at my hair as Gen ripped at his!
So why was it so irritating?
First, Gen's voice. He has the most annoying voice I've heard in any anime to date. I don't know if people liked hearing voices like this in 1983, but from a 2010 viewpoint, I couldn't stand it. It's loud, obnoxious, and stays that way all throughout the movie.
I'm sitting here, trying desperately to see the emotional qualities of the movie, and this voice comes out of nowhere, blasting at my ears and detracting from what little sentimental elements there are.
Which leads into my second point. The characters are distant. This is no After Story. The characters aren't shallow, yet they seem to be hopelessly so! How is this…
Read at the sourceff7highwind
What a horrible movie..And I don't mean horrible in like a PeeWee Herman or Micheal Jackson sorta way I mean horrible in a *cut wrist* sorta way. I'll admit that initially, since I had watched Grave of the Fireflies before this movie, that because the animation wasn't as realistic as it could have been that I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch it or not. However, I have always been interested in the events of World War 2 so I gave it a go. Wow...that's all I can really say. The story is something most of us already know. During WW2, the Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb over Hiroshima. This movie is about that experience, but shown through the eyes of a little boy. I have never seen a movie that showed these horrific events in such detail. We see people getting burned alive, dying…
Read at the sourcejonathanlane
Barefoot Gen is at the same time a compelling visual of the horrors of war and a cheesy soap opera; a devastating tale of courage and survival and a badly written one dimensional flick. Gen can be seen as the polar opposite of the epic masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, for although they deal with similar subjects the way they go about doing it are completely different in both style and quality. Where Fireflies focuses on the small picture, one brother trying to care for his litter sister, Gen is bent upon showing the "big picture" of the war, the devastation that it brought upon the whole country. The difference is that in Gen, to get the desired emotional response they had to kill over 200,000 people, and when the mass deaths stopped so did the films quality; in Graves they only had to…
Read at the sourceArchaeon
"I dug my father, sister and brother out of the ruins. Their skulls and other bones were intact. I thought humans became like that when they were burnt. When my mother's body was cremated however, there were very few bones. It made me shake with anger that the atomic bomb radiation deprived my mother, who had survived for 21 years, of even her bones. I vowed never to endure wars or atomic bombs"
(Taken from an interview with Nakazawa Keiji by Jonathan Clements.)
On Moday, August 6th, 1945, the US bomber Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb known as "Little Boy" on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The explosion killed around 70,000 people immediately, with almost as many again dead from the resulting radiation by the end of 1945.
Nakazawa Keiji, the author of Barefoot Gen, was 6 years old at…
Read at the sourceinternetotaku
Barefoot Gen is one of the rare Anime films that everyone must see, at least once. If you've read the Manga then you might be a little disappointed by this movie, initially. This movie, in comparison to the Manga, lacks some of the Manga's emotional depth due to the movie cutting out most of the characters' establishing story. In this way, the feeling for the characters by the audience is diminished. Instead, the movie moves quickly to the day of the actual bombing of Hiroshima. In doing so, the movie forgoes much of the interpersonal violence that takes place in the Manga and replaces it with a much wider sweeping and graphic violence. The events during and following the bomb are depicted rather grusomely. The advantage of Anime as a medium is used to full effect here as the bomb's blast…
Read at the sourceScallion
Don't watch this movie. Not that it's a bad movie, by any means. It's just that if you've been taking antidepressants, or have a cynical view of the world already, this movie won't help improve your outlook on anything for the time that you're watching it. It's not a date movie. And it might not be the best movie to introduce someone to anime. However, it's a great film in its own right, and will tug at your heartstrings, and give you the sniffles, or at least a manly, single tear.
For those of you who haven't finished this part of your history books, skip this huge spoiler:
The city of Hiroshima gets bombed. People die. A lot of innocent people die. Barefoot Gen is WWII unfiltered, and unapologetic (and a little over-exaggerated, but you can suspend your belief because of the important p…
Read at the source