Every description of cocoon – One Summer of Girlhood talks about it as a work of historical fiction about World War II, specifically concerning the Himeyuri students forced to work as nurses in Okinawa. So I was surprised to see the film open with a disclaimer that, while situating the production in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII, also claims that the film's “settings, situations, and characters are entirely fictional” and that “the war is a fictional one created by a manga.”

This disclaimer has me confused about what to make of the story being told. I've reached out to representatives from the Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (where cocoon is making its American premiere) and the US distributor GKIDS for comment — the former didn't know what the disclaimer was about, and the latter has yet to respond.

Reviews from the original Japanese TV airing make no mention of such a disclaimer and talk about it as historical fiction, so I have to conclude this attempt at fictionalizing a real setting and events is a strange localization choice. What I can't determine is whether this is an intelligence-insulting decision — did one of the Japanese studios think Americans couldn't handle watching a movie addressing violence our country enacted in the past? — or an implicit acknowledgment of fault — a determination that if the film failed in some way as history, it is better to present it as pure fiction.

I'm not enough of an expert to assess the film's overall historical accuracy, but compared to Machiko Kyō's original manga, it is undeniably a softer depiction. This softened version still hits hard on its own terms. There are images in Toko Ina's anime I'll never forget, and the story of San's survival amidst the deaths of all her friends is still a painful emotional experience. It succeeds as a powerful illustration of the horrors of war and an impressive calling card for new animation studio Sasayuri. As an adaptation, it's a bit more questionable.

Let's start by talking about a change that absolutely works: the visual style. Sasayuri is the latest studio to emerge from the ashes of the not-dead-but-not-doing-full-time-employment Studio Ghibli, and they've adjusted Kyo's more abstract art style into something decidedly more Ghibli-esque. The change works for the sake of animation, and the results are extremely impressive for a TV movie and should still look good on the big screen (it's scheduled for American theaters September 4). The painted backgrounds are amazing, as beautiful as any classic Ghibli movie. The character art is where the production's TV limitations show — the detail and shading are simpler and more inconsistent than the theatrical Miyazaki standard — but even so, the character movement is fluid and convincing.

TV content standards mean there is almost no way this anime could be as gory as the manga, especially in a more realistic art style. Compared to the manga, it takes longer to reach the worst violence, spending more time in a foreboding yet relatively calm “cute girls doing cute things” mode. Once the violence hits, it's time for the movie's artistic masterstroke: to shield San from the horrors in a cocoon of imagination, Mayu tells her that “drops of blood are colorful flower petals.” From then on, almost all blood and gore is illustrated with flowers, a bold decision that sounds potentially silly in theory but is absolutely haunting in practice. The imagery is at once beautiful and sickening, making even a peaceful pillow shot of petals floating in a river churn one's stomach.

While the anime adds this imaginative stylized element, it loses one from the manga: while Mayu still tells San the soldiers are “white shadows,” they are no longer drawn as such. I get the intention of drawing the soldiers in a more realistic style, especially in light of a climactic scene where we finally get a clear view of a face from the opposing side. The change that feels weirder is one of language: where anime-Mayu speaks of “soldiers,” manga-Mayu speaks of “men.” The manga's strong commentary on gendered violence - that it's not one side of the war or the other that San is scared of, but men in general - is still present in the movie, but it has been made less explicit and loses some of its power. The story's most interesting gender-related twist has been preserved, but it's presented more subtly, arguably too much so.

The Himeyuri story is a horrifying chapter of history. These schoolgirls faced sexual violence from the very soldiers they were assigned to care for, and many committed mass suicide because propaganda told them the enemy would subject them to even worse. This tragedy makes for intense viewing, and San's choice to keep living finds a satisfying positive note amidst the trauma. However, it feels as if the anime has deliberately depoliticized the context compared to the manga. The book's ironic punchline of San being treated better as a POW than she was by her own government has been cut out entirely. As its own work of art, the cocoon movie is worth viewing, but its changes from the manga and the further decontextualization of that disclaimer have me growing more critical of it the more I think about it.