Ushiro no Shoumen Dare

Alt title: Who's Left Behind

Movie (1 ep x 93 min)
1991
3.717 out of 5 from 245 votes
Rank #2,985

Kayoko is a cheerful girl who is growing up in war-time Tokyo. She has four elder brothers, doesn’t like music lessons, is frightened of her grandmother and is excited that a baby is on the way. When she grows up, Kayoko says, she wants to be a war nurse so she can tend to her uncle in the armed forces. As a child she’s a little prone to crying, but tries to be more mature when her younger brother is born. However, Kayoko’s typical childhood changes when the Americans begin to bomb Japan. Kayoko is sent into the countryside to live with her aunt, and soon she will have to face the reality of war.

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Reviews

Ebonyslayer
8

One of the anime films I saw while getting towards my milestone. This is a pretty good war movie for a number of reasons. One of them being that World War 2 is the setting while its focused on Kayoko and her family. And it makes sense cause it focuses on how the family lives their every day life as the war gets closer and closer. Story- The entire story is focused on Kayoko and her family. Basically, our main character is Kayoko, a typical little girl who'd much rather have fun and play games with her friends at school and cries a lot whenever things don't go her way. She lives with her mother, father, grandmother, and three brothers, along with another sibling on the way. The war seems so far away to them, even though they hope for their country to succeed. Kayoko doesn't care about the war, nor does it have anything to do with her life here, so she doesn't bat an eye to it. But the war grows closer and closer, and Kayoko realizes that she's really going to have to grow up fast once things get bad. Animation- The animation, while nice, does make the characters, mostly the kids, come off as a bit too cartoony for their own good, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Everything else looks absolutely stunning to look at. Backgrounds are drawn and painted nicely, and character movements are quite fluid considering how old this movie is (1991). Sound- The music, while also not having much to write home about, is nice, simple, and fits the mood perfectly. It's nothing special, but since I'm the type of person who is okay with a lot of music, as with the classical music, it fits the movie like a glove, and didn't need to be anything more than it was. Characters- The characters are where the movie really shines. This is MUCH more of a slice of life movie than anything else. I wasn't kidding when I said the action and actual destruction scenes are VERY few and far in between. There's very little death, but it's there, and almost always offscreen, and actual death scenes DO happen, but they're not explicit, which I feel worked in the movie's favor. The movie is just simply about Kayoko, her life, and her family, and the movie really goes out of its way to portray them as just a normal Japanese family, not a bunch of victims or aggressors. They do whatever they can to support their country, whether it's from cheering their soldiers on to giving materials away so they can be made into weapons and explosives, and so much detail goes into their daily lives that you really feel immersed in the characters and really get to know them from their little quirks to their fatal flaws and everything else, along with being treated to excellent character development in the form of seeing the characters grow and change over the course of the coming years of the war. The extreme focus on just the characters and not the actual conflict actually works in favor of the movie, because if you get to know the characters really well, then you'll be able to feel more sympathetic toward them when the conflict DOES sneak up on them. Since the movie is much more about the emotional losses that come from the war rather than the actual war itself, having engaging and good characters helps in this endeavor. Another detail I found interesting is the use of all of those Japanese nursery rhymes throughout the movie. Heck, one final stanza of one song is the title of the movie itself, and in a way its pretty symbolic if you think of the children's singing the songs as a way of conveying the fact that they're blissfully unaware of how badly things are going to turn out later on, and by stopping all the fun, they have to grow up fast if they want to get by. This is pretty much what Kayoko does in the final quarter of the movie. Kayoko herself is a pretty interesting character, though she starts off as a bratty little girl who'd much rather have fun than pay attention to the war and cries whenever something goes wrong or is forced to do something she doesn't want to. But she really does grow into a strong character later on, and in a very believable way while not losing one of her defining character traits. Her family is also very well developed as well. Because of this, when bad things DO happen to the characters, you really feel sad for them and feel angry that they have to suffer like this when they didn't do anything to deserve it. Yes, I admit begrudgingly, I cried near the end of this movie, and so did a lot of other people. See? You don't need lots of death or destruction or a bunch of bad things happening all over the place in order for us to cry for the characters who suffer. if you don't feel for the characters or relate to them, or if they're not in any way engaging or interesting, then it comes off as boring and forced. Nowadays, we have really forgotten what makes a story good. We try really hard to jazz things up to make a super creative story that we fail to realize that even small, simple stories that have been done over and over again can be good, and sometimes, it's the old stories we've seen that are so full of life and make us feel emotions like empathy or joy or sadness. Going back to the simplicity is what makes Who's Left Behind special, because it isn't trying too hard to be something it isn't. It's just a nice albeit sad story about a girl and her family living their lives before the war. It isn't alienating, it's very informative, it's simple, it's charming, it's simplistic in the best of ways, it's enthralling, it's engaging, and there's no cliche victim vs villain plot anywhere. The best part is that the death scenes are very few and far in between, often not seen at all, but they're not overdone or overemphasized to the point of excessive melodrama. They're exactly what they're supposed to be: chilling. Overall, its a good family movie.

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