Its noon now and I have just finished watching "Fireflies River of Light" or in Chinese, "萤火虫，飞吧！". The actual movie is in Japanese, but with english subtitles, of course.
What a nice story!! Its about this teacher (Miwa-sensei) who teaches in elementary school. He faces a lot of complaints by the 66 parents of his 33 students - Not enough homework, not teaching manners, not enforcing discipline, not forcing their children to drink more milk, not forcing their children to eat more vegetables, not releasing them on time so that they can get to their tuition classes... And the list goes on..
One day the class decided to breed fireflies. They went to look for all the information they could gather on breeding them. This interest a girl from the class, Hikari, to open her heart and to take care of these fireflies larvae. Hikari is a student with psychological barriers as her mother died before she was enrolled into e. school and her father got drunk everyday and reached home to only beat her up. She then goes to live with her mother's aunt in a village.
Hikari was told that if the fireflies fly, she would get to see the one she missed most. Therefore, the whole class got together, tried their utmost best in breeding hotaru. It soon took away their focus on school work and the vice-principal insisted to stop the project immediately. Miwa then took the responsibility and agreed to resign his post if these fireflies do not fly.
After many obstacles, the fireflies reached the stage where they can be released into the rivers. However, the river by the school is so dirty that they would probably not survive it. The students then put their hearts together to clean up the river. Then came the news - concretation of the river. With the concretation, breeding of fireflies would not be possible as the fireflies will have no mud to dig into. Hence they did a petition (a really thick book, in fact) from all the people living in the area to save these fireflies.
As all these people have not seen fireflies since a long time ago (at least a decade), ever since the river became polluted, they agreed to sign the petition and it was later agreed that the concretation project was to be postponed.
Winter came and disaster strucked. A thunderstorm resulted in massive flooding and it appeared that the fireflies are being washed away. The students were very disappointed. However, Miwa did not give up and when Spring came, he brought his students to the river to wait for the fireflies.
For decades, it was the first time that fireflies returned to the village area. Everybody was so touched to see them again, even the vice principal. Hikari got to see her mother.. and you can guess what happened.
Well, its a nice story.. Pretty touching there. It shows how our environment affects us, and most importantly, how we affect our environment. People bathe with so much conditioner and soap without realising that those water will flow into the river and pollute them.
Another theme shown here is how a teacher is determined to let his students learn from their surroundings and nature. (Although he seems sort of clumsy at times..) Especially because he was enlightened by his teacher when he was in the 6th grade (when his parents divorced and left him) and his teacher was the only one who did not abandon him.
I mean, teachers really are saints, arent they? In my opinion, other than our parents, they are the next people that I am most grateful to. Without them, we would be nothing.
Oh did I mention? That little girl (Hikari) reminds me of Lorna. I mean her looks =)
- photos courtesy from http://hk.movies.yahoo.com/051004/28/1hcl5-p.html
