Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓, Hotaru no Haka) is a 1988 animated film written and directed by Isao Takahata . This is the first film produced by Shinchosha, who hired Studio Ghibli to do the animation production work. It is an adaptation of the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka, intended as a personal apology to the author's own sister.
Some critics (most notably Roger Ebert) consider it to be one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made. Animation historian Ernest Rister compares the film to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and says, "it is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen
Taking place toward the end of World War II in Japan, Grave of the Fireflies is the tale of the relationship between two orphaned children, Seita (清太) and his younger sister Setsuko (節子). The children lose their mother in the firebombing of Kobe, and their father in service to the Imperial Japanese Navy, and as a result are forced to try to survive amidst widespread famine and the callous indifference of their countrymen, some of whom are their own extended family members.
The movie begins in Sannomiya Station and shows the second main character, Seita, in rags and dying of starvation. A janitor comes and digs through his things, and finds a candy tin containing Setsuko's ashes. He throws it out, and from it springs the spirit of Setsuko, Seita and a group of fireflies. The two spirits provide narrative throughout the story. The film is, in effect, an extended flashback to Japan at the end of World War II, during the Kobe firebombings. Setsuko and Seita, the two siblings, are left to secure the house and their belongings, allowing their mother, who suffers from a heart complaint, to go to a bomb shelter. They are caught off-guard by a batch of bombs dropped in their vicinity. Although they survive unscathed, their mother is caught in the air raid and dies from burns. Having nowhere else to go, Setsuko and Seita go to live with their aunt and write letters to their father. On the second day that they stay there, Seita goes out to retrieve leftover supplies he had buried in the ground before the bombing. He gives all of it to his aunt, but hides a small tin of fruit drops. (This tin of fruit drops becomes a recurrent icon in the film.) Their aunt barely gives them enough food, insults them and sells their mother's kimonos for rice which she keeps for herself.
Seita and Setsuko finally decide to go and live in an abandoned bomb shelter. Gradually, they begin to run out of rice, and Seita is forced to steal food from local farmers. When he is eventually caught, he is unable to feed Setsuko enough before she begins to starve. In desperation, Seita withdraws all the money from their mother's bank account. At the same time, he learns of his father's death. He buys a large quantity of food and rushes back to the shelter, where he finds Setsuko hallucinating. She is sucking marbles which she believes are fruit drops and offers him 'rice balls' which are really only rocks. Finally, she dies of starvation. Seita cremates her, using supplies donated to him by a farmer and puts her ashes in the fruit tin, which he carries with his father's photograph, until his death on September 21, 1945.
At the end of the film, the spirits of Seita and Setsuko are seen, no longer raggedy and etiolated but healthy and well-dressed, sitting side by side as they look down on the modern-day city of Kobe.
Grave of the Fireflies
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