Final Rating: 4/5
Children Untold, directed by Miwa Nishikawa, stars Ami Koyae as Kotoko, a young girl who evacuates Tokyo before the end of World War II. Following Japan’s surrender, Kotoko returns to Tokyo, but her parents are nowhere to be found. While holding out hope for an eventual reunion, Kotoko begins living on the street alongside other war orphans, shining shoes and stealing food to get by.
The life of a street urchin is tough, and as Kotoko learns from her peers, it can be especially difficult for girls. Hoping for a better fate, Kotoko cuts her hair and begins living as a boy, linking up with a group of paperboys who welcome a new member with open arms. Paperboys who work for, as it turns out, a Yakuza criminal gang.
Nishikawa’s vision of mid-1940s Japan is lived-in and polished at first glance. While there are scenes that take place in the ruined outskirts of Tokyo, the city itself feels as alive and intact as ever. People live and work in the city as they would have before the war, and for many, life returns to something approaching normalcy.
However, this depiction of Tokyo serves mostly as a backdrop for characters whose lives will never be normal again. Once spoiled children, now orphans, who litter the streets. Widows are forced into sexual slavery behind closed doors.
Kotoko is given a rich backstory. The daughter of a respected musician, she grew up learning the works of great Italian and French composers (the latter of which she later suppressed due to France being “the enemy”). After defying her family to leave Tokyo with hopes of “serving [her] country on the frontlines,” she continues to practice piano while bonding with other evacuees, including her teacher, Sore (Fumi Nikaido).
Returning to Tokyo after the end of the war, her days and nights huddled alongside other orphans under a bridge feel as if she’s merely waiting to be picked up and taken home. When she returns to familiar locations, flashbacks show the place and Kotoko as they were, soberingly contrasted with the girl who has changed, and the place that has ceased to exist.
Kotoko is a headstrong and stubborn girl who is ultimately humbled by circumstance. From the start, she’s bold and edgy. Kotoko defends her friends from bullies who lambaste them as traitors, but has no problem using the same epithets. After months as an orphan, Kotoko remains fiercely independent, but shows more empathy even when speaking her mind.
An early scene sees Kotoko calling her teacher a traitor while loudly repeating a rumour that she snuck out after curfew to see her boyfriend. Later, Kotoko confronts her teacher about the Imperial propaganda she’d been taught in her class, asking what the point of it all was if it couldn’t prepare her for the world she must live in. It’s a remark that cuts just as deep, now rooted in experience rather than gossip.
Nikaido as Sore shines, adding an adult perspective on the same events. As a war widow, Sore’s situation is similar to Kotoko’s: she has no family to return to, her skills are not in demand, and she nevertheless has to survive. As an adult, Sore is better equipped to handle peacetime than Kotoko, which gives her scenes a touch of levity amongst the film’s general bleakness.
The dominant feeling of Children Untold is unfairness. Kotoko feels as if her life was stolen from her; her friends feel similarly robbed. Even the one friend who reunites with her family ends up growing up too quickly, forced to become the primary breadwinner to take care of her wounded father and young sibling.
That unfairness is more than just material, however. Kotoko is part of a generation that started school during the war. Having absorbed entire curricula of Imperial Japanese propaganda, the children of Tokyo find themselves in a world where the world didn’t end after their defeat. Kids who grew up ready to die for their country are shocked to hear adults pivoting to encouraging them to live, learn, and pursue their passions. A new, hopeful message that feels deeply hypocritical as those same kids experience poverty firsthand, as well as abuse at the hands of Americans and Japanese alike.
Nishikawa’s screenplay excels at emphasizing the disparity between the haves and have-nots, showing the toll war takes on the most vulnerable in society. Children shaped by war struggle to adapt to peace. Even after Kotoko learns to survive in post-war Japan, she can never let go of the bitterness that comes with learning that the world she grew up in no longer exists, and the values she grew up with are no longer relevant.
The tragedy of Children Untold isn’t merely a loss of innocence, but a wilful betrayal of the promise of a better world.
In its depiction of the aftermath of war, Children Untold serves effectively as a cautionary tale about propaganda. The children of Imperial Japan grew up being sold a vision of a future that was always a lie. When that world came crashing down in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, the children that survived were the least equipped to abandon that vision.
Children Untold was seen during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Thank you to The PR Factory for the screener.
