This review contains non-detailed discussions of gore, sexual violence , and suicide, as well as spoilers for both the film and the manga version.
People are instinctively wary of war stories from 20th-century Japan. Imperial Japan was an aggressively expansionist military power that committed some extremely grim crimes both prior to and during World War 2. Japan is also famous for denying those crimes.
Japan is, at the same time, not a monolith, and the original Cocoon manga is extremely critical of the Japanese army.
There are good things in the Cocoon anime, though largely soured by my issues with the story and decision to cut or soften certain scenes. The animation and voicework are both effective; it's a very pretty film. A story also doesn't necessarily need to make everything loud and obvious and happen onscreen to make sense. One especially upsetting scene involving sexual violence is actually improved by the anime's decision to be more discreet, cutting away from the act but still displaying the aftermath.
Cocoon is a story of young girls being fed to the war machine, having been taken in by nationalist propaganda. Or at least, the manga is. There are a fair amount of gory and disturbing scenes depicting rotten corpses, infected wounds, and the mental toll that constantly being surrounded by death and violence takes. It's not a fun read, but these aren't present to shock the viewer; they're to illustrate the horrors of the situation.
Almost none of this is depicted in the anime, at least not in a meaningful or thematically interesting way.
Instead, many scenes - largely the most significant and haunting ones - are either softened or entirely removed. Most blood is depicted as flower petals, and while in-text this is meant to reflect the state of mind of main protagonist San, it feels patronizing to the viewer. This is a story about the horrors of war that doesn't want to depict the uncomfortable things from the manga; the most egregious use of flower-petal-gore comes from a scene where many of the survivors are gunned down. This scene is not in the manga.
Many of the most heartwrenching deaths from the manga that get to stay in the film are offscreen, or replaced by scenes like this. Most character reveals and development are absent. The protagonists (and audience) run through pastoral landscapes that appear unmarred by fighting, even at the most dire of moments.
Many lines are changed as well, and while they convey similar emotions, they don't convey the same meaning. A group of survivors decide that it's better to die than to be captured. The rationale for this differs between the anime and manga, and the anime's refusal to discuss this beyond a vague "the soldiers said to" undermines the original purpose of the scene. The final scene has San reunite with her family in a camp, where her mother comments that the Americans are treating them better than their own soldiers (though they're still prisoners). The final lines in both versions are this:
I may have wings, but I'm unable to fly. Which is why... I chose to live instead.
In the manga, this reads as a rejection of the propaganda that led to the survivors from earlier ending their lives (among other scenes throughout the manga). But because the anime refuses to contend with that propaganda, it becomes a sort of vaguely inspirational line. The emotional weight it carries is lost.
It is a series of self-defeating decisions that weaken the film. Even the Ghibli films from which Cocoon draws its visual style from are willing to portray more than this. It's ineffective as an anti-war film beyond a vague, overwrought "war is bad" message. I would hope people think war is bad.
The most biting text of the manga has been replaced with barely-legible subtext, and that's where the disappointment lies. It's perfectly decent in a vacuum, but this story just doesn't exist in one.
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