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 film’s opening narration tells of Women’s 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 we’ve 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 three-act structure or clearly-delineated 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 35-minute 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 name-only, buoyed by a disquieting realism that everything we’re 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 aren’t 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 it’s in realizing this that the animated segments manage to work, almost like a series of small vignettes that are loosely tied together.
(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 slice-of-life. To be sure, this slice-of-life was already on shaky ground considering the overall circumstances of contemporary World War II, but it was still a slice-of-life 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 live-action portions. Intercut with the animated portions are the at-the-time surviving relatives of the schoolchildren that the special fixates on. We see Yoko’s father play the song that he meant for Yoko to hear when he returned from his tour of duty, but that she never did. Hitomi’s mother, barely able to walk even with a cane, visits a grave. We see Noboko’s parents, who still lived in the same house 40-plus 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 they’ve outlived their children.
(The live-action 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 Renais’s Night and Fog / Nuit et Brouillard or Claude Lanzmann’s 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 special’s way of keeping these people and these children alive in memory. To quote Star Trek: The Next Generation’s episode “The Inner Light” for just a moment, “If you remember what we were, and how we lived, then we’ll 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. It’s for this reason why all the animated portions and the live-action 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 it’s true that in a perfect world, every real person’s 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.
