Barefoot Gen
This is a Japanese animated feature about the bombing of Hiroshima.
The feature has a rather long explanatory opening.
By this time Japanese were running to the bomb shelters quite often. On that day an all-clear was sounded.
Barefoot Gen. The film centers on his family; his father, mother, sister and his brother and follows them through their normal daily activities.
The film covers how soldiers were given warm sendoffs, but how people also did not have enough to eat.
The mother, who is pregnant, is suffering from malnutrition. One question I have is why haven't the father and the doctor been drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army? They were using a very wide draft range for ages. The father has wondered why all the main cities around Hiroshima had been bombed but Hiroshima hadn't suffered much from bombing.
Narration on the takeoff of the Hiroshima bombing mission.
An air raid is sounded when the two observation planes pass overhead. The all-clear is given, though. They did not know the third bomber, the Enola Gay, was approaching. If the three planes had been together and the people had all been in the fallout shelters, maybe not quite as many would have died.
Gen has gotten to school and watches as the atomic bomb drops.
There are a lot of very graphic scenes when the bomb explodes.
The destruction of things is also covered. The rest of the film is concerned with Gen digging himself out from the debris, finding what has happened to his family, and trying to survive in the aftermath. The explosion takes place around 33 minutes in the 1 hr. 23 minute film.
He sees people walk past, skin hanging from their bodies.
His father, sister and brother are trapped in a burning house. His mother has survived, but they have to leave before they can free the others.
His mother has her baby.
The next section of narration.
Another section of narration.
More narration.
The second atomic bomb drops on Nagasaki.
The war ends.
From that point the film deals with how Gen and his mother tried to survive.
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