Ayano Shiraishi’s voice work in Grave of the Fireflies makes Setsuko’s small pleasures matter as much as her distress. We rate it highly because she sounds like a child whose day still contains things worth noticing.
Fi1m perspective
Setsuko can still take pleasure in an ordinary hour, and Ayano Shiraishi gives those hours their due. In Grave of the Fireflies (1988), she voices a child whose attention is not permanently fixed on the disaster around her. There is space for distraction in the performance, which helps us believe in Setsuko before the film asks us to endure her distress. We found the small moments of happiness painful, because Shiraishi makes us care about what Setsuko enjoys even as her circumstances worsen.
Shiraishi was five when Isao Takahata cast her, following auditions seeking a child performer who spoke the Kansai dialect. Her voice was recorded using the prescore method, before the animation was complete. That production detail helps explain why it would be wrong to treat the voice as a finishing touch applied to the drawings. Her natural delivery matters more than any display of acting skill; we do not spend the film listening for technique.
The achievement does not belong to Shiraishi alone. Tsutomu Tatsumi, voicing Seita, helps make the children believable together, while Takahata gives their pleasures the same attention as their distress. The drawing takes ordinary responses seriously, so the voice is never left to do all the work of persuading us that Setsuko has a life beyond being pitied. Takahata’s patience is essential: he lets us get to know both children without reducing them to a reason for the audience to feel sad.
Grave of the Fireflies is her only credited film role, with no further documented voice-acting credits. That limits what we can say about her as an actor, but it does not make the work here slight. We recommend the film strongly because it spends enough time with these children for their ordinary activities to matter, even while we fear for them. Approach it as a war drama, and do not expect the animation to make the evening easier.
