"In the broadest sense this film is a denunciation of a system that stifles individual growth and transforms personal ambition into unflinching devotion to the state. In 1928, when Miss Oishi, a shockingly modern and progressive woman, begins her tenure as an elementary school teacher, the future seems to hold limitless possibilities for her twelve first-grade pupils. When the story ends, in the late 1940s, this promise has been wrecked by war, poverty, and restrictive tradition." (Stuart Rosenthal, PFA '78) "There was a deliberate dropping of experiments in form and technique to meet realism head-on in one of Japan's greatest lyrical pictures. The film was also a triumph of casting, using amateur child actors picked up on the spot with an excellent matching of the child actors who played the children at different age levels, and incorporating a truly beautiful performance by Hideko Takamine as the teacher." (Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film)