The Wizard of Oz

No solar term is attached to today. What this pair fills are two gaps that have stayed empty in the archive: a 1939 Hollywood colour musical fantasy and a 1988 Japanese hand-drawn animated feature. They belong together because they take opposite sides of one subject, home. The Wizard of Oz uses the most lavish fantasy imaginable to make going home a goal worth walking the whole road for; Grave of the Fireflies begins at the moment a home is burned down and watches two children try to assemble one again out of a tin of fruit drops and the light of fireflies. Forty-nine years apart, one dreams in three-strip Technicolor and the other draws ashes on celluloid, yet both place a child at the exact centre of a collapsing adult world. As the days shorten after the start of winter, the two are worth thinking about side by side: first believe there is a road back, then think about those for whom there is none.

堪萨斯农场上的女孩 Dorothy Gale 与叔叔婶婶住在一起，小狗 Toto 惹了邻居的麻烦，她决定带着它离开。一场龙卷风把房子连人带狗卷到一片陌生的土地；落地时压到了一位女巫，芒奇金人与好女巫 Glinda 告诉她，要回堪萨斯，得沿黄砖路去翡翠城找 Oz 大王。路上她先后遇见想要脑子的稻草人、想要心的铁皮人和想要胆量的狮子，三个同伴决定陪她走完这条路。影片到这里才刚过一半，后面的事不宜提前说破。

Produced by MGM in 1939 and adapted from L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it was directed primarily by Victor Fleming. It was not a box-office triumph on release. The turning point came in 1956, when CBS bought the television rights and the film began returning to American living rooms year after year; the Library of Congress would later call it the most seen film in cinematic history, and in 1989 it was among the first 25 titles named to the National Film Registry. Its technical place is equally clear: the Kansas scenes were shot in sepiatone while every Oz sequence used three-strip Technicolor, and the art department spent almost a week settling on the shade of yellow for the yellow brick road. Over the Rainbow, composed by Harold Arlen with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and later ranked first in AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs; Herbert Stothart won Best Original Score. In Sight & Sound's 2002 poll of directors it placed 41st. It endures not because the fantasy is large but because it turns the plainest of wishes, wanting to go home, into a road that has to be walked to the end.