Rotterdam 2026 Review: PELELIU, GUERNICA OF PARADISE

Anime was well represented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year. The selection included Hosoda Mamoru's Scarlet (reviewed here), Aoki Yasuhiro's ChaO (reviewed here), and this peculiar one: Kuji Gorō's war drama Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise. Based on a manga by Takeda Kazuyoshi, it shows the experiences of Japanese soldiers stranded on an island at the end of World War Two, hiding and fighting while being unaware that the war has already ended.

We follow Tamaru, a shy Japanese soldier who wants to be a manga artist and spends any free time making drawings. In 1944 Tamaru and his comrades are sent to defend a small island in the Pacific, while the American army is steamrolling its way towards Japan. After an incredibly brutal battle, Tamaru and a few other miraculous survivors are left for dead and forgotten by everyone. Banding together, for years the group hides in the jungle, looking for food and preparing for another fight against the Americans, unaware that the war has already ended with Japan capitulating,

The first thing you notice upon watching Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise is the rather unique designs of the human characters in it. While nature and military hardware is shown in a high level realism, the soldiers look like Funko Pop versions of themselves. It makes the film initially look cute, and you wonder where this is going, but then the first casualties happen, and the film is no less bitter than a more realistic -looking counterpart would be.

There are several stories about mad Japanese soldiers emerging from the jungle, years after the war, still thinking they were fighting a war. But Peleliu, the island, was a real-life event that was one of the worst examples. Many thousands of soldiers died on the island on both sides, and the handful of Japanese which survived the battle hid for more than two years, three quarters of which happened while the war was already over.

Director Kuji pulls no punches in his depiction of the battle, or the endurance tests which followed in the years after. People are shot, lose limbs, get blown up, burnt, stabbed, get diseases... And it is here that the cutesy designs pay off. Using the puppet look allow Kuji Gorō' to show most of the ultraviolence as-is without becoming too nauseating to look at. You get a VERY good idea of what is happening to these people, while at the same time you don't need to make the film R-rated. In the Q&A after the film showed in Rotterdam, Kuji explained this approach allowed the story to be told to a wider audience. The Peleliu story is not well-known in Japan, it isn't taught in schools, and he wanted many people to see the film and learn about it. Also people who would not have been able to stomach the harsher moments in the film if a more realistic style had been used for the main characters. And this style also makes the violence poignant instead of exploitative. It is still shocking, and not shocking-for-fun. Indeed it's an interesting story, very well told, with time taken both for the events leading up to the battle and the aftermath. On top of that you get a very mournful soundtrack by master composer Kenji Kawai, channeling some of the beautiful work he did for The Sky Crawlers.

Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise made a big impression on me. It tells its story with respect for the people who lived through it. It is one of those rare movies that shows how traumatized its main characters become without traumatizing the viewers. Rotterdam audiences agreed and awarded the film a mean average of a 4.2 out of 5. Me, I gave it full marks. I highly recommend seeing it.