Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

I finished Grave of the Fireflies and just sat there. No credits scroll has ever felt quite so much like an intrusion. You want a couple of minutes to breathe, maybe stare at the wall, collect yourself. That's the kind of film this is, and I mean that as one of the highest compliments I can give.

I've watched a fair amount of anime over the years, some of it bleak, some of it brutal, but nothing has hit me the way this one did. It is, without question, the most depressing piece of animation I've ever sat through. That's not a warning to put you off. If anything, it's a reason to watch it. There's a difference between a film that makes you miserable for sport and one that earns every ounce of your heartbreak. This earns it several times over.

What Studio Ghibli achieve here is extraordinary. The film takes the Second World War and looks at it through a lens most Western audiences will never have considered: ordinary Japanese civilians, specifically two young siblings left to fend for themselves as American firebombing reduces their world to ash and hunger. It's a perspective that doesn't ask you to take sides politically. It just asks you to look at two children and reckon with what happens to them. That's more than enough.

The film doesn't ease you in gently, and it doesn't offer you much in the way of relief once things start to unravel. Gutpunch after gutpunch, as I said in my notes watching it. There's a relentlessness to the grief that feels completely deliberate. It's not wallowing. It's honest. War does this to people. Children included.

I'm a dad. I have two young kids. I genuinely don't know whether that made the experience richer or just more painful, probably both. Watching these two navigate starvation, illness, loss and the sheer indifference of a world consumed by conflict hit me somewhere no amount of critical distance can protect you from. I found myself thinking about my own two throughout, which I suspect is exactly the point. The film wants you to project. It wants you to feel the full weight of it.

The animation itself is gorgeous in the way that great Ghibli work always is, where beauty and horror share the same frame without either cancelling the other out. There are sequences of genuine visual wonder in here, the fireflies of the title among them, that make the surrounding devastation land even harder by contrast. It's a cruel trick, and a masterful one.

I've been working my way through a lot of Japanese cinema and animation lately, and I reviewed Only Yesterday (1991) not long ago, another Ghibli film that operates at a similarly thoughtful, human scale. That one is warm where this is harrowing, but both share the same commitment to emotional honesty that marks the studio out from almost everyone else working in animation.

If you've been putting Grave of the Fireflies off because you've heard it's a tough watch, I get it. It absolutely is. But tough and worthwhile are not mutually exclusive, and this film is as worthwhile as they come. It's a harrowing depiction of war from a perspective that deserves to be seen, and it's made with the kind of care and craft that demands your full attention.

Four and a half stars. Another banger from Studio Ghibli, even if banger doesn't quite feel like the right word for something that leaves you feeling this hollowed out. Essential viewing.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1988  | Watched: 2025-04-07

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon US

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