Please be aware that this special is only about 80 subtitled at the time of this writing so there will be brief pockets of time where a nonJapanese speaker may not be able to understand what is being said. The sentiment however does come through. 550https://i.ur.com/tH6RvgH.png Girls in Summer Dresses is a Hiroshima story that is less about the atomic bomb dropping and more about preceding and contemporary reminiscences surrounding the drop. The films opening narration tells of Womens Secondary School No. 1 with a real journal that was kept and maintained by the Year One Class Six students to tell of their successes and achievements. Throughout the course of the special we follow the lives of a select few girls who were in that class named Yoko Hitomi and Noboko bringing us almost directly into what life in wartime Japan was like for someone who would have been traveling to attend the school. We see feminine etiquette classes about how to properly sit and gesture as one might normally expect but we also get a glimpse of some of the harsher realities. Children walk home in straight and orderly lines within groups as a precaution for safety against airstrikes from Americans there is a shortage of material for making the usual summer dresses that girls would have worn in school and there were restrictions on wearing white since it can be seen more visibly from the skies and make the girls potential civilian targets. During its fixations on the past it takes on the visual format and style that weve come to associate with anime but disposes of the traditional sense of fiction that also comes associated with the medium. The series thus relies on a rather interesting angle to its whole approach. After all anime is not typically regarded as the preferred medium of storytelling when it comes to the presentation of factual information even in historical fiction or fiction that was based on real events documentaries textbooks encyclopedias and others already take care of that for us divorced from the normal sense of narrative that we associate with conventional animated works like the threeact structure or clearlydelineated characters. Girls in Summer Dresses does utilize these narrative qualities to an extent in that it follows three children specifically during the course of its 35minute runtime and might have to extrapolate a few details in order to give the special some kind of center. However the special poses as a fictionalization in nameonly buoyed by a disquieting realism that everything were seeing transpire is something that can be reasonably implied to have happened. With the journal as the fulcrum that balances everything together it uses animation to bring to life a kind of unusual quaintness that feels devoid of any usual standard of dramatism. Unlike certain moments like the firebombs in the exposition for Grave of the Fireflies there arent really any scenes that depict action at least in the sense that we normally use the term. Actions do take place within these moments and its in realizing this that the animated segments manage to work almost like a series of small vignettes that are loosely tied together. 550https://i.ur.com/ttVPvpV.png Any sense of action during the depictions of the past are rarely grand or overt instead occurring through tiny moments of respite quietness or trying to find tiny pleasures in the midst of their circumstances. The traditional imagery or scenes of war like fire bombs crying or dead bodies are mostly kept out of focus save for a select few times It occurs in moments like when the girls are huddled in a cave after a siren goes off and their teacher tells them to take shelter. It occurs in moments like when the students want to sing a particular song to commemorate their summer dresses being finished. And yes it also occurs in the final moments when the bomb goes off in a flash. Because these small moments pepper the special they all act as melancholic reflections of a bygone time that would end with their eventual deaths the last days of any kind of peacefulness that the girls might have known or envisioned. In a tragic sense Girls in Summer Dresses asks its audience to realize the last vestiges of a different kind of sliceoflife. To be sure this sliceoflife was already on shaky ground considering the overall circumstances of contemporary World War II but it was still a sliceoflife nonetheless. People had to live their lives and go about the day even under such extenuations. However the main aspect of the special that really makes it all come together is not necessarily the animated portions but rather how they work in conjunction with the liveaction portions. Intercut with the animated portions are the atthetime surviving relatives of the schoolchildren that the special fixates on. We see Yokos father play the song that he meant for Yoko to hear when he returned from his tour of duty but that she never did. Hitomis mother barely able to walk even with a cane visits a grave. We see Nobokos parents who still lived in the same house 40plus years later take out the dress Noboko worked to make. They unfold it and touch it like a sacred object as though the thought of any other blemishes other than the blemishes already on it would be too painful to experience. We learn that the same dress was eventually donated to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Even in the midst of their attempts at being stoic as they provide a little reflective commentary of their own the sadness reverberates through their words and their actions. The lack of music and presence of ambient noise creates a stillness that makes for effective filmmaking emphasizing that the moment is about these people and the grim reality that theyve outlived their children. 550https://i.ur.com/NhdTiqp.png The liveaction portions are handled delicately and it could not have been easy for these parents to allow themselves to be filmed in their vulnerable grieving. These sequences are always treated completely seriously and respectfully Like some other films such as Alain Renaiss Night and Fog / Nuit et Brouillard or Claude Lanzmanns Shoah Girls in Summer Dresses understands that actually seeing people grieve or the scenery of the present long after a tragedy or horror occurred can act as an important ingredient to keep the significance of a memorial or testimonial alive. Especially in regards to tragedies within history we tend to conceive of them in the abstract even when we have photographs or videos of them occurring. We are always viewing these things from a distance separated by geography culture or time. The animated portions are in essence the specials way of keeping these people and these children alive in memory. To quote Star Trek: The Next Generations episode The Inner Light for just a moment If you remember what we were and how we lived then well have found life again. Everyone dies at some point with some lives being taken far too early. And to be sure Girls in Summer Dresses could never perfectly recreate Japanese life or the life of the three girls in the days leading up to August 1945 no anime or documentary could actually do that with the lack of video and photographic footage. But what matters more is that it sincerely tries in the best way that it set out to do. Its for this reason why all the animated portions and the liveaction portions never come across as either exploitive or in poor taste. Like the overall quiet sound within the special Girls in Summer Dresses is quiet ruminative and plays itself like an elegy using the few creative liberties it has to paint a sincere picture of loss and sorrow. While its true that in a perfect world every real persons tragedy would be captured and understood the inability to realize that should not disincentivize telling the stories that we can. When all is said and done this special tackles the few stories it has with utmost seriousness. That is perhaps all that can be reasonably asked of it. 550https://i.ur.com/zxNhOdd.png The remains of Nobokos dress. It was donated to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Due to the nature of this special I do not feel that the rating system is appropriate. Therefore please consider the rating here to simply be a placeholder rather than anything definitive.