I had high hopes for this one but the film falls flat on numerous levels. One gripe i'm having about this one is the same as with quite a few japanese so-called anti-war movies. Just imagine there was a german director doing an "anti war"-flick that completely avoids even mentioning the holocaust, the atrocities of war, the rise of fascism and other societal failures that made the horrors of war possible. No, instead, the film would be almost exclusively dealing with the hardships the germans had to endure during and after WWII... that would leave kind of a bad taste in your mouth, wouldn't it? It really saddens me to see Nobuhiko Obayashi commiting this major blunder, a director who always struck me as someone whose heart was in the right place. As it stands though, this is an overlong structural mess of a film shifting back and forth between the threads of a theater group doing some kind of wartime re-enactment and a bunch of actors recounting the horrors of war in a faux-documentary fashion as the film wildly overstays its welcome (really, the thing should be about half as long) repeating the same very basic message over and over: We shouldn't start another war because war has been a horrible time FOR US, the Japanese - while offering very little reflection on issues like war crimes committed, the rise of imperialism and the sociall climate that made the war possible in the first place. On the plus side, we get a first peek at the digital compositions Obayashi would take full advantage of in Hanagatami (2017), the third and IMO best part of his anti-war trilogy (Casting Blossoms... being its first installment). Just like everything else about this film though, things don't really gel together on a visual level either.