When Studio Ghibli alums adapt a wartime manga drawn to kick your heart in the ass, you best believe you’re willfully walking into the theater with the clear expectation you’re going to ugly-cry a couple of times long before its credits roll. GKIDS’ latest theatrical anime omakase, Cocoon—One Summer of Girlhood, is exactly that: an absolutely stirring cinematic experience and a gutting work of art that doesn’t pull its punches.
Directed by Yukimitsu Ina (Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!) and animated by Sasayuri, Cocoon—One Summer of Girlhood serves as their debut feature. Based on Machiko Kyo’s award-winning manga, the film tells the tale of a troupe of schoolgirls conscripted as makeshift medics during World War II. At the heart of its story are San (EN: Lauren Kong, JP: Marika Ito) and Mayu (EN: Anjali Kunapaneni, JP: Hikari Mitsushima). After months in which the pair and their all-girls school treat their situation like a day at sleepaway camp, the fog of war finally reaches their once-tranquil island, bringing all the horrors that come with it as the girls fight desperately to reach a brighter tomorrow that may never come.
Pedantically, one might expect the grim reality of San and Mayu’s war-torn lives to hew closely to Ghibli’s own depiction of WWII horror in The Grave of the Fireflies. The films certainly complement each other, especially in the idiosyncratic way both linger on small, mundane, fanciful moments before everything irreparably goes to hell. But Cocoon stands apart from its spiritual predecessor in the novel way it unflinchingly renders every imaginable horror that would befall a young girl at the hands of enemies and friends alike.
Off rip, Cocoon knows exactly how sobering and heavy an experience it is to ask of its viewers; it’s not for the faint of heart. Unlike the manga’s wide-eyed confrontation with carnage on every page, Sasayuri’s adaptation leverages the anime medium’s strengths through a distinctive form of self-censorship. Before the girls are left to their own devices—cowering from the terrifying sound of bomber plane engines flying overhead, bullets hailing from enemy soldiers, and emotionally scarring abuse from their own countrymen—Mayu places a “spell” on both San and viewers. In place of blood spatter, bursts of vivid, weightless flower petals dance across every frame of action. On paper, this visual direction might sound like a step down from its source material, yet the choice is a provocatively ingenious one. By filtering violence through fleeting beauty—which might as well be the mission statement of the film—every subsequent firefight and devastating loss suffered by San and Mayu lands with far more weight than any straightforward depiction of bullet wounds and viscera ever could.
Most importantly, the film doesn’t veer into wartime torture porn by volleying a marathon of the worst things to happen to Mayu and San. That’s not to say the film shies away from the gnarly depiction of war. The film goes pretty hard into the realities of the battlefield, with crude amputations on wounded soldiers and the sudden and permanent end of landmines. But Sasayuri’s idiosyncratic visual direction, showing the weightlessness of flower petals dancing in the wind rather than all the violence San is pretending isn’t befalling her dear friends, is still a gut punch that heightens the desperation and heart that its story hammers home, rather than making a spectacle out of them. All of which gets the most out of composer Kensuke Ushio (Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc), whose soundtrack emphatically underscores every heart-wrenching moment in the film’s 85-minute runtime.
Wartime anime of this magnitude almost guarantees a hard watch, with rarely a dry eye in sight by the time it’s over. And Cocoon is no exception. It distinguishes itself from both its contemporaries and its predecessors by bringing to a global audience the real-life tragedy that befell the Himeyuri students in Okinawa, which inspired its tale. Likewise, Cocoon shines as a timeless mirror to the horrors of war still unfolding today in how it refuses any astroturfed framing of “one side good, one side bad,” end of story. Instead, it centers its story, drawing from the gray lived reality of people on the ground that the world might scroll past on the timeline or turn a blind eye to as they go about their daily lives.
Still, Cocoon is a tough watch—one that handles the responsibility of its subject matter with a remarkably deft hand, but it’s a heavy movie to sit through. By the end of it, Cocoon earns its place as a quintessential anime not only for the difficult conversations it brings to light about girlhood being a special kind of hell during wartime, but for the unwavering hope it harbors that such events may never happen again. Cocoon might not be a film one can bring oneself to revisit often, but it’s a movie that deserves to be felt at least once as one of the most humbling anime films of the year.
Cocoon—One Summer of Girlhood releases in select theaters on September 4th.
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