Huh. Works for me in different browsers. Its in german without subtitles, so may be less useful for most dopers.
Green Wyvern writes:
> Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. It’s about the aircraft designer who designed the Japanese ‘Zero’ planes used in WW2.
But none of it is actually set during World War II. It starts at the end of World War I and continues until sometime in the mid-1930’s. There’s a final scene set immediately after World War II. Bizarrely, although the parts of the film concerning the career of the main character Jiro Horikoshi are based on his work as an aircraft designer, much of the personal parts of the film (about his relationship with his wife) have no relationship to his real life. They are taken from a novel by Tatsuo Hori called Nahoko.
Here’s a long list of German World War II films:
Here’s a website about Japanese World War II films:
I refer to think it is not the majority of the populace in Japan that thinks this way but a loud minority, who make a lot of movies.
Hopefully you’re right. From what I’ve read, the public perception of WWII in Japan has begun to change in the last 20-30 years or so, since the Cold War ended and the country has begun to engage more with the rest of Asia.
/subscribe. I’m familiar with lots of films set in post-war Germany, dealing with the social aftermath, but not films set in wartime.
One of the ~90’s era Godzilla movies features a young version of the king of monsters attacking WWII soldiers.
The East Germans certainly made World War II films. One of the most famous is 1975’s Jakob, der Lügner, which Hollywood remade in 1999 as Jakob the Liar with Robin Williams in the title role.
:dubious: That seems really strange given how Godzilla in most incarnations is either awakened or created by atomic bombs.
The video is blocked in the US.
Gets a little harder to ignore that China and the two Koreas think they’re assholes.
Japanese conveniently forget about all that; the civilians who suffered from the US bombings were never political nor responsible for the attacks on other countries; husbands and sons who had to go off to war were innocent of wrong-doing and either come back in one piece or not at all; folks who had to fight on their own home ground, as in Okinawa, were very brave and suffered tragically. I have watched a lot of TV dramas (more than theatrical-release movies) and this is what is portrayed. NHK, the state broadcasting system and biggest program source, is particularly guilty of this.
What have you read? I’ve been in Japan for the last 20 years and I think I have my finger on the pulse.
Articles about it in various places, usually written during salient anniversaries of WWII events. Why? Do you think it’s inaccurate? Have the Japanese people not changed their view of the war since 1989 or so?
In Japan in particular, for quite some time there were many films with allusions to WWII.
E.g., the 1964 film Onibaba (recently aired on TCM) is set in the 14th century during a civil war but has overtones that apply to WWII, in particular some … properties … of a mask that plays a key role that people see as a reference to the atomic bombings.
While Kurosawa made explicit WWII movies, it’s not hard to find people arguing that several of his other films, e.g., Rashomon, had WWII symbolism.
Not quite the same thing, but Germany also made movies *during *WWII. Yes, during the height of the war, with shortages everywhere, they took the time and money to make a huge blockbuster movie about the most famous tragic shipwreck in history. Yes, they made Titanic. With a budget of $180M in 2013 dollars, it was the most expensive film of its time. It was, of course, a propaganda film first, showing how the evil capitalists of White Star were responsible for the disaster, while the brave and heroic German first officer fought against them.
If we’re going to talk about German films made during World War II that aren’t about the war, let me mention the 1943 The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It cost about $30 million (U.S.) dollars adjusted for inflation. It’s pretty good. It cost so much that spending all that money meant that the Nazis spent that much less on the war, so it probably contributed to them losing it, just in case you think that you’re supporting the Nazis by seeing it now. In my opinion, it’s not quite as good as the 1988 Terry Gilliam movie of the same name, but I’ve only seen each of those films once.
I just watched my first few kaiju movies (there was a marathon on some cable channel). The ones I saw from the 1950s and 1960s are totally “about” the war: evil/misguided militarists, the threat from atomic energy (and technology in general), the necessity (and dangers) of pacifism, a mood of resigned helplessness in the face of overwhelming force …
Not that this is a new observation or anything – but I was shocked on watching my first kaiju movie how blatant these themes were. Since I didn’t ever form a childhood fondness for watching rubber monsters stomp on model trucks, looking for weird thematic elements is what kept me watching past Godzilla/Gojira.
I took an Interim course in Nazi cinema when I was in college. When talking about propaganda value and high cost, Der große König (1942) was a lavish production that blatantly compared the Prussian king Frederick the Great to Adolf Hitler. Kolberg (1945) was the most expensive film of the Nazi era at eight million RM. It had the second largest extra cast ever (187,000) after Ghandi, 50,000 of whom were actual soldiers seconded to the production at a time when the Reich was being overrun on all fronts. It was supposed to bolster morale at home by presenting the eponymous Napoleonic-era siege as a parallel to the desperate situation Germany was then in.
One that hasn’t been mentioned from Japan is not actually a movie but a 26-part anime series. It’s Zipang, where the plot revolves around a warship (the Mirai) of the Japanese Self Defence Force sent back from around the year 2000 to 1942 and the Battle of Midway.
So at the start, the Mirai sails past the Yamato, the largest ship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which was sunk in 1945. So the Mrai’s crew realise they have been sen back to the middle of WW2, while sailors n the Yamato see a strange warship flying the Japanese naval ensign.
The captain of the Mirai has a moral dilemma. He is in charge of the most powerful warship in the Pacific, and he knows how the war will go. including the impending defeat of his country at the Battle of Midway. However, his navy is allied with the US Navy, ad he believes that in the long term it was best for Japan to be defeated in the war, so he decides to try to keep out of the war, including not intervening at Midway to help the IJN.
The rest of the series involves both the the IJN and the USN trying to find this strange Japanese warship, while the Mira does become involved because it saves a Japanese naval lieutenant from drowning, and shows him the future history in the ship’s library.