Grave Of The Fireflies: Roger Ebert __link__

We open in a crowded train station. A young boy, ragged and skeletal, leans against a pillar. He is dying. A janitor approaches, finds a candy tin, and tosses it into a field. From the tin, a small, ghostly firefly rises. So begins the memory of Seita, a teenager trying to keep his little sister, Setsuko, alive in the final months of World War II.

I have seen this film three times. I will never watch it again. But I am grateful it exists. It is one of the greatest war films ever made—indeed, one of the greatest films, period. See it once. Bring no children. Bring no snacks. Bring only the knowledge that animation is not a genre, but an art form capable of expressing the deepest registers of human pain. grave of the fireflies roger ebert

Roger Ebert’s Rule of thumb: A great film is one that allows you to see the world through another’s eyes. Grave of the Fireflies forces you to see through the eyes of a helpless child. The animation becomes a tool of unbearable intimacy. When Setsuko sucks on a marble and pretends it’s a candy, we don’t see a drawing; we see a child’s imagination cannibalizing itself to survive. When she finally makes a “rice ball” out of mud and clay, eating it with desperate, theatrical delight, the screen blurs. That is the moment you realize you are crying. We open in a crowded train station

Takahata does not animate his characters like the cutesy mascots we expect from the studio that gave us My Neighbor Totoro (released as a double feature with this film in Japan—imagine that emotional whiplash). He draws them with an aching realism. When Setsuko cries, her face crumples like wet paper. When Seita tries to be brave, his jaw is tight with the terror of a child who knows he is the only shield between his sister and the void. A janitor approaches, finds a candy tin, and

The story is brutally simple. After their mother is horrifically burned to death in a firebombing—her bandaged, maggot-ridden body a shocking image for any medium, let alone animation—Seita and Setsuko move in with a distant aunt. The aunt is not a monster. She is worse: she is practical. As rations shrink and the war effort fails, her kindness curdles into passive-aggressive resentment. “You eat our rice but do nothing for the war,” she seethes. Seita, too proud and too young to beg, takes his sister to live in an abandoned bomb shelter.