Synopsis
A group of war orphans initially seen scratching out an existence through black market work, as they are taken under the wing of a nameless soldier, just repatriated after the war.
Children of the Beehive
1948 ‘蜂の巣の子供たち’ Directed by Hiroshi Shimizu
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Alternative Titles
Hachi no su no kodomotachi, Шумная семья, 벌집의 아이들, Les Enfants du nid d'abeilles, Дети улья, 蜂巢的孩子们
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Theatrical
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Japan
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Japan
24 Aug 1948
- Theatrical
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A country in ruins, physical and emotionally and the kids that play act through it. As manipulative as one might expect from such material, but who cares? Shimizu is a master at small well observed moments and he is great with the kids. There's a light touch to his approach even as material becomes harsher. A great landscape film as well and much like in his 30s masterpieces, Shimizu has a feeling for how body relates to space that is rare.
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A strong contender for the most beautiful film ever made. Shimizu's humanism and his incredible eye for space and nature make this heartbreaking story of drifting youth on post war Japan one of the most tender and heartwarming commentaries on brotherhood and community. It's just the perfect balance between poetry, good-spirited humor and naturalistic observation. The scene where one of the boys takes his friend up the mountain on his back, so that he could see the sea one last time and finally be reunited with his mother, is one of the most generous in the history of cinema. A film that makes me believe in life, filling my heart with hope and love.
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A film about carrying your friend up a mountain, just so he can look at the sea one last time. I may never find the words to express what Yoshibo means to me---his journey put me in such a state that I questioned my own relationship to cinema. Do I make myself too vulnerable when watching? Do I connect with the characters too much, to a dangerous degree? I felt all the pain of the entire world as I watched---this is the first time in my life that I truly understand what it means to feel "heartbroken". However, I also felt great joy, and great hope for humanity; Shimizu did rip my heart in two, but he also managed, somehow, to put it back together again by the end. This is certainly one of the great films about finding post-war community, and one of the great films about the brotherhood of man.
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Paradoxically the most innocent films are made when the innocence has died. That being said, one can feel the guilt as an undertone in Shimizu's underseen masterpiece that defines post-war milieu unlike we've ever witnessed. Even if guilty isn't one of his main themes, he never calm down his characters who blame themselves for what has happened, sometimes this happens verbally but sometimes strong close-ups are enough to enlighten us about the nature of good and evil, right and wrong in those days. It isn't as dark as Germany Year Zero or The Bicycle Thief but still feels like sky falling to one's heart with its whole weight. I must admit that time gives films usually some special value (that…
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You can make an argument that this is one of the best example of humanist cinema, I however find it frightening that this is not even spoken in the same light as German Year Zero from the same year (or any part of Rossellini’s War Trilogy).*
The over archiving message here is kindness, as that is how a nation will heel, rebuild and grow
- how a solider decides not to go home and will look after a group of kids. giving them a much needed moral compass;
- from the orphans giving their needed food to other children;
- how a child carries his dead friend on his back to the top of a mountain, in complete scored "silence"… -
"The sea can cure my disease."
Shimizu's heartfelt poem to the lost souls. An entrancing masterpiece. The sequence in which Yoshibo's friend carrying him to the mountain to see the sea is one of the most beautiful sequences I've ever seen from Japanese cinema. -
exquisite, flawless images. exquisite, flawless cinema. for my money, one of the great landscape films of the 20th century. oh my god when the one boy carries his friend up the hill... that's what it's all about.
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Thank God the war is over. That means that Hiroshi Shimizu can go back to making adorable children's pictures again! Here a film centering around a bunch of war orphans traveling the countryside to see what the future brings, and the adventure is pure Shimizu! Simple, naive and adorable!
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Normally I don't go for movies like Children of the Beehive that use children as emotional guilt trips. But this has broken that for me.
Made fresh after the war, the innocence of this movie is so tangible and heartwarming in its own way. Through the eyes of these children, we get a really stark look at the country of Japan at this time period. There are many scenes of joy and fun all while surrounded by destruction and poverty and almost seemingly no prospects for a future.
There's a quick scene where they look out to Hiroshima and the camera pans to the left that perfectly encapsulates the entire movie. It starts by showing a growing city with many…
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Orphans and repatriated soldiers drifting through a Japan in ruins, two kinds of superfluous bodies who find themselves on the outside looking in wherever they go. It's not necessarily all dark, though, as it also can be viewed as a summoning of all the children (like the summoning of the carps in FOUR SEASONS OF CHILDREN), a constant re-population of the frame.
If I understand the subtitles correctly, Shimizu sets this up as a quasi-sequel to INTROSPECTION TOWER, which makes quite a bit of sense: The centralizing authority of the fascist ideology is gone, so the children spread out, to the sea, into the fields, and now it's cinema's job to provide the means for another, better form of community.
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Shimizu's Ninth Symphony? His vision of a postwar Japan, gradually but inexorably pulling itself back into shape, has "Ode To Joy" stamped all over it. Moving and psychologically astute; these children (war orphans, by and large, abandoned to their own devices) are driven by their own innate longing for order and stability -- as much as anything else -- toward the greater social good, figured with structural rhymes and visual metaphors that underscore the obvious narrative beats. "Beehive," of course, defines the sort of social order Shimizu embraces as his ideal, so it's a very Japanese-inflected humanism... but I don't have any problem with that. This time.
And I can only love his generosity in extending redemption (to call it that) in the closing moments even to the most unlikely of all the characters.
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Streamed via YouTube
Soldier: To give food to loafers at stations isn't good for them. They want something else from us.
Masa: What is it?
Soldier: What shall I say? Love.In Japan after WWII, war orphans were punished for surviving. They were bullied. They were called trash, sometimes rounded up by police and put in cages. Some were sent to institutions or sold for labour. They were targets of abuse and discrimination. A 1948 government survey found there were more than 123,500 war orphans nationwide. But orphanages were built for only for 12,000, leaving many homeless.
One war orphan that survived the brutal subsequent years shared the following:
How could we, as children, have spoken up against the government?…
