‘Why do fireflies have to die so soon?‘
If you want to be entertained you watch an action movie. If you want to be scared you watch a horror movie. If you want to feel an unrelenting fury then you watch a Tim Burton movie (leave Alice in Wonderland alone, you freak). But, conversely, if you want to learn about death, then you watch… a kid’s movie? Yes. Bambi. The Lion King. Coco. If you want a studied meditation on grief then animation is the place to go. Grave of the Fireflies comes from the same spiritual realm as those classics with a heart-breaking dollop of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas thrown in for good measure. Basically, if you have a heart in your chest, this film will destroy you…
Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi) and his adorable younger sister Setsuko (Ayano Shiraishi) struggle to survive following a senseless tragedy brought on during World War II in Japan. I wouldn’t want to give away much more than that in terms of plot. Just watch the thing.
So yes. Grave of the Fireflies is achingly, unapologetically sad. But it’s also utterly beautiful. Never before has the fragility of life and the importance of family been rendered so gracefully on screen. This is a film that tackles the most complex and difficult subject there is but does so in a way that is so simple that even young children will understand. And they should understand. What did the Dread Pirate Roberts say? Life is pain, princess. And he was right. Grave of the Fireflies accepts this inescapable fact whilst also nudging it’s characters towards the light. Even when children are starving to death they still have the stars in the sky or the dim glow of fireflies by a serene pool.
If you haven’t already guessed, Grave of the Fireflies had a profound effect on me. Once again, Studio Ghibli proves its worth and Isao Takahata’s classic deserves its status as the only Ghibli film to sit comfortably inside the IMDB top #50.
A quiet, gorgeous, celestial masterpiece.