monkee
Jedi
One of the best anti-war movie I've ever watched.
Plot summary: Setsuko and Seita are brother and sister living in wartime Japan. After their mother is killed in an air raid they find a temporary home with relatives. Having quarreled with their aunt they leave the city and make their home in an abandoned shelter. While their father's destiny who was a soldier is unknown the two must depend on each other to somehow keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. When everything is in short supply, they gradually succumb to hunger and their only entertainment is the light of the fireflies.
Review
Plot summary: Setsuko and Seita are brother and sister living in wartime Japan. After their mother is killed in an air raid they find a temporary home with relatives. Having quarreled with their aunt they leave the city and make their home in an abandoned shelter. While their father's destiny who was a soldier is unknown the two must depend on each other to somehow keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. When everything is in short supply, they gradually succumb to hunger and their only entertainment is the light of the fireflies.
Review
Highly recommended for the anime geek among us. ;)Movies about soldiers, generals, and national leaders don't really get at why war is so awful. In even the most militarized societies, there's still a massive civilian population of people that try to go on living their lives in much the same way, only with a million times the stress placed on them. Most confused are children, who aren't yet equipped to understand just why the world has changed so much.
Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (from a novel by Akiyuki Nosaka) tells the story of a brother and sister trying to survive during the American firebombing of Japan during World War II. The boy, Seita, is about twelve; his sister, Setsuko, is about five. Their father is in the Navy; they lose their mother early on. An aunt takes them in, but soon grows to resent them, and they strike out on their own.
[...]
I have, up until this point, been somewhat careful to avoid mentioning that Grave of the Fireflies is animated. In the United States, animation is often treated more as a genre than a medium, and the idea that a movie can be both animated and a serious drama is greeted with a bit of skepticism. Why not simply do it as live action, one may ask. That Takahata is an animator should be the only explanation necessary.
This film does show him to be one of the masters of the medium. The character designs are flawless, from the rounded Setsuko to the gangly (but serious) Setia. The depictions of war's horrors balances is never graphic enough to come across as exploitative, but never understated, either. He knows when detail adds power and when it is distracting. He steadfastly resists the temptation to cram more onto the screen when stillness is more effective.
Grave of the Fireflies is a quiet movie about the collision between how a child looks at the world and an environment which makes no allowances for a child's innocence. Among those who have seen it, it is often described as one of the best films about war every made, and deservedly so.
http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=7404&reviewer=371