From fireflies to lit windows and from lit windows to fireflies: Alex Dudok de Wit on Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies () is the subject of Alex Dudok de Wit’s new book, his first, for the British Film Institute’s (BFI) Film Classics series. Dudok de Wit’s writing has appeared in Sight & Sound, Vulture, Little White Lies, The Telegraph, The i, The Independent and Time Out, and in specialist animation publications such as Skwigly and Cartoon Brew, where he was formerly the deputy editor. He has written and narrated a short documentary for the BBC about British puppet animation. His English translation of director Hayao Miyazaki’s graphic novel Shuna’s Journey appeared from First Second Books in 2022. In what follows, Dudok de Wit and I explore Fireflies’ incredibly sad tone; the potentialities and the limitations of animated films, both Studio Ghibli’s and beyond; Takahata’s and Miyazaki’s depictions of war, respectively, in Fireflies and in the Academy Award-nominated film The Wind Rises (); Dudok de Wit’s considerable research for this monograph; and finally, how he reads Fireflies’ complex ending.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".