YMMV / Grave of the Fireflies

• Accidental Aesop: Most people who see Grave of the Fireflies take an anti-war message away from it. According to Isao Takahata, the director of the film, that wasn't what he was going for at all.
• Adaptation Displacement: The film is actually an adaptation of a short story. A semi-autobiographic short story.
• Adorkable: Seita in his rare, less serious moments where he and Setsuko aren't in a life-or-death situation. Notable examples include his running and cartwheeling on the beach before toppling over, his enthusiasm telling Setsuko about their father's naval review, and his cheering and laughing and excitement after finding and looting goods to trade for food.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • A mass-scale example, as Takahata wanted the viewers to think that Seita was being an overly prideful little boy for not simply apologizing to his aunt and asking to move back in. The majority of the audience, needless to say, saw him as one of the biggest victims in cinematic history — partially due to the lack of Jerkass moments compared to his aunt.
  • It looks like aside from pride, there's the very pragmatic issue that his aunt was struggling to take care of Seita and Setsuko, and with the newly decreased rations they would have imposed on everyone beyond their abilities.
  • Perhaps the aunt took them in without thinking things through. She still believes their mother is just sick in the hospital when Setsuko first arrives, and thinks Seita will be in school or working. So once she realizes that they have nowhere else to go, perhaps her Jerkass behavior was her hoping it would drive them out or, alternately, shame Seita into doing more to contribute to the household either through helping out with chores or getting a job (which ostensibly didn't work).
  • There's also the possibility that Seita didn't look for a job because he wanted to take care of Setsuko, especially after their mother is confirmed to be dead. And he probably had good reason to think Setsuko might be mistreated by the aunt if she was left alone with her.
  • Was the aunt telling Setsuko their mother is actually dead a Kick the Dog moment? Or, as an adult with more experience child-rearing than Seita, did she feel it was best to be honest with the girl to prevent heartbreak later? Or both?
  • The 2005 live-action version of the film does this with the aunt, where the majority of her behavior stems from the fact that her husband gets killed in the war and she has four children of her own to look after in the meantime. Rather than be deliberately cruel to Seita and Setsuko, she points out that Seita isn't doing anything to contribute to the household or war effort and she can't afford to let her children (one of whom has asthma) eat less for it. Unlike in the animated version, however, she is shown to feel guilty once she learns of their fate.
• Angst Aversion: Grave of the Fireflies has a rightfully earned reputation as one of the saddest animated films ever made and one of the saddest films ever made, period — and there's no shortage of people who refuse to watch it for that very reason. A common quip is that it's a film that everyone should see... once.
• Base-Breaking Character: Seita himself is divisive amongst viewers. Some viewers love him and considers him to be a sympathetic and desperate kid whose actions, while flawed and misguided, were understandable given the horrific circumstances he and his sister were living in, while others hated him and saw him as a prideful and selfish idiot who was Too Dumb to Live.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Outside of Japan, some people often attribute this (and Pom Poko) to Hayao Miyazaki. He had little to do with this movie — even though thanks to Studio Ghibli it does resemble some of his works.
  • Seita and Setsuko do not die in a nuke. The crux of the film is them dealing with the aftermath of firebombings, which were common around the end of World War II. They instead died due to malnutrition and starvation.
• Death of the Author: To be clear, Director Isao Takahata insisted that the film "contains absolutely no such message" about being anti-war. While Takahata himself held anti-war political beliefs, it wasn't what he was going for with this movie. Regardless, even if it was not intentional, there's a reason why so many people see Grave of the Fireflies as an anti-war film. The film shows World War II exclusively from the perspective of children, and yet they suffer all the same in a war they neither started, fought in, or even understand all that well. There is no glory to be found in what happened to them, only pain, suffering, and loss. The fact that the story is based on what Akiyuki Nosaka actually went through as a child only drives the War Is Hell vibe home that much more.
• Fanon Welding: Some fans like to interpret the train that Seita and Setsuko get on in the film's beginning to be the same train from Miyazaki's later film, Spirited Away. This becomes a bit of Fridge Brilliance given that the train in Spirited Away is meant to take dead spirits to the afterlife.
• Genius Bonus: As stated on the main page, Seita and Setsuko's Dad is shown to be on the Japanese cruiser Maya. Which WWII buffs will likely know sank in 1944 after being hit by an American submarine, thus it's heavily implying that the two's father was among 479 men who lost their lives after said ship was sunk.
• Glurge: Bennett the Sage and some other critics have accused the film of being this, claiming that it exploits the tragedies of World War II in order to guilt 1980s youth into falling in line and being more like their parents’ generation.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The opening scene is of Seita's death and his reunion with Setsuko in the afterlife. It's a Tear Jerker to begin with, but once you've actually seen the rest of the film and realize what they've been through, it hits much, much harder.
  • At one point in the film, Seita and Setsuko's aunt points out they have relatives in Tokyo. Seita doesn't know how to contact them and even if he did, the chances are they would either be dead or no better off than him and Setsuko as Tokyo was firebombed on the night of March 9th-10th 1945, a week before the firebombing of Kobe, which is what forced Seita and Setsuko to go and live with their aunt in the first place.
  • The closing scene is of Seita and Setsuko looking over what was, at the time of the film's production, modern-day Kobe. A few years after the film was released, Kobe got hit by Hanshin-Awaji Japan's worst earthquake since the 1920s, killing over 6,000 people and causing over 10 trillion yen in damage. Among the landmarks of “modern” Kobe is the Hankyu Sannomiya Station building, with its trademark arch spanning the railway tracks. The structure was damaged beyond repair in the earthquake and subsequently torn down, although it was rebuilt (without the arch) in 2020.
  • This hits hard when the manufacturer of Sakumashiki Drops went out of business in 2023 due to falling sales and rising costs.
• Hype Backlash: Ironically enough, its reputation of being one of the saddest animated films ever made (if not the saddest) can provoke this kind of reaction from several viewers who don't share the same impression.
• It Was His Sled: Seita and Setsuko end up starving to death is the most well known thing about this film. The former mentioning his death is the film's opening line.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Seita and Setsuko's aunt is technically just a woman in over her head in a war situation, with a family of her own to take care of — and is merely callous and mean to the two. It's actually Seita who leaves them, and the aunt just doesn't protest very much. But she's one of the most hated characters in anime history, precisely because her Jerkass moments drive the children out and lead to them dying.
• Mainstream Obscurity: It's a famously brutal depiction of the horrors of war, conveniently explaining why no one ever gets around to watching it.
• Memetic Mutation: Going with the fact that the film originally premiered as a Double Feature with the Lighter and Softer Breather Episode My Neighbor Totoro, people have been calling this double feature "the original Barbenheimer".
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Grave of the Fireflies has been lauded by many as one of the greatest anti-war films ever made, and has gained fans in anti-war movements due to its unflinching depictions of the cruelty and barbarity of war. However, while he was no fan of war, Takahata explicitly stated on numerous occasions that Grave of the Fireflies is in no way, shape, or form intended to be an anti-war film. Then again, when he expanded on his reasoning, he believed his film could never dissuade a war and could easily be misused to justify one. The film, as well as Takahata's political stance, had always been full of anti-war sentiments.
  • Audiences are meant to side with Seita's aunt, not Seita himself. Instead, the reverse happened, with audiences sympathizing with Seita while his aunt is seen as The Scrappy.
• Misaimed Merchandising: While they are Setsuko’s favorite, it’s still awfully jarring to see Setsuko’s image on the packaging of certain Sakuma Fruit Drops tins◊ especially considering how the tin gets used at the end. They’re heartbreakingly delicious.
• Moe: None other than Setsuko, who is a innocent young girl who suffered a tragic death.
• Narm: Setsuko's voice in the 1998 English dub. Corinne Orr is a veteran anime voice actress, with her first credit being Speed Racer in 1967. However, it's obvious that Orr was trying too hard to sound like a 4-year-old, and it ruins some of the more dramatic scenes. While her voice in the 2012 dub isn't perfect, at least Emily Neves has a lot of experience voicing young girls.
• Nightmare Fuel: The film is undeniably Studio Ghibli's darkest and most depressing film to date, as it deals with two kids attempting to survive the end of World War II. It's because of this dark and somber tone, however, that it is also regarded as one of Ghibli's best and most powerful films, with it being one of three Ghibli films to achieve a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (the other two are Only Yesterday and The Tale of Princess Kaguya, which, coincidentally enough, were also directed by Isao Takahata):
  • Seeing your mother (or anyone close to you for that matter) horrifically burned and bandaged like a mummy. Along those lines, there's the face of Setsuko in her last moments. Both are this in a horribly heart-twisting way.
  • Setsuko and Seita gradually succumb to malnutrition and illness over time, with no one to help them out.
  • This poster◊ for the film contains a particularly chilling (and easy-to-miss) detail. Right above Seita and Setsuko, you can see the ominous shadow of a B-29 bomber looming in the sky. The "fireflies" above Setsuko's head aren't fireflies, they're bombs.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Seita and Setsuko's relationship has some Incest Subtext to it at times.^note Due to the nature of the story, some fans are offended by the mere suggestion of this idea. Word of God even acknowledged it in the original short story, claiming that in some ways Setsuko becomes Seita's lover, as she functions as his Morality Pet.
• Realism-Induced Horror: The film does not shy away from the realistic consequences of peoples' actions as a result of the war, which is done for the sake of being scary or shocking:
  • Seita and Setsuko's mother dies from the bomb raid of Kobe that burned down the town. She's burned beyond recognition and covered in bandages when Seita finds her. She doesn't survive much longer, including getting infested with maggots as a result of so much blood in one place.
  • Setsuko dies a slow death of malnutrition. By the time Seita finally takes her to a doctor, she's practically skin and bones, she's covered in rashes from seawater, and she mentions that she's been having diarrhea from not eating properly. Just before slipping off into death, she's hallucinating that marbles are candy and rocks are rice balls, a result of her brain on its last legs. Even though Seita does manage to feed her watermelon, she's too far gone to save.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • In the Central Park Media dub, Veronica Taylor voices Mrs. Yokokawa. It’s worth noting this dub was released only one week before the first English episode of Pokémon.
  • Dan Green does an incidental voice in the Central Park Media dub years before he broke out into mainstream anime like Yu-Gi-Oh!.
• The Scrappy: In Japan, Seita's aunt won third place in a poll of the most unforgivable anime characters, only beaten out by Puella Magi Madoka Magica's Kyubey and School Days' Makoto Itou.
• Stoic Woobie: Seita, who is proud, courageous, and remains impassive in all but the most desperate moments.
• Squick: The cleaner licking Setsuko's ashes is clearly this.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Seita. Word of God is that the audience isn't supposed to sympathize with him. Given everything he goes through, however, fans did the opposite. The fact that he's based on the creator, who ostensibly felt his best wasn't good enough, was also a factor.
• Values Dissonance: In an early scene, Seita and Setsuko's mother goes off to a shelter to seek safety without her children, leaving her son to carry his younger sister around while the town is under attack from the air raid bombs. While Westerners would consider this to be reckless endangerment, the original intention was that Seita was the man of the house since his father was away serving in the Navy. Since he was old enough, his mother trusted him to finish securing the house and watch over his little sister. According to the bonus material, this behavior was also explained by the fact that previous American bombings had been relatively light and aimed at industrial sites only, so nobody was worrying too much until the bombs starting attacking residential areas.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: You'd be forgiven if you thought Setsuko was a boy.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The film may be more considered an adult anime internationally due to how bleak it is, but it is still considered an all-ages family film in Japan, specifically targeted towards adolescent audiences as the message of the film is most important towards them. But on the other hand...
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?:
  • Its reputation as "the saddest anime film ever" certainly didn't help, but it had the additional misfortune of being a Studio Ghibli film released at the same time as the much Lighter and Softer My Neighbor Totoro, leading cinemas to show it as a double feature with Totoro and shown first just to get audiences to see it.
  • "Suggested 3 Up" is on the back of the cover for Central Park Media's second DVD release. It does say "parental discretion advised", but that's rarely followed. The original Central Park VHS contains the description "Suitable for Most Audiences".
  • That said, as mentioned above, it is considered a family film in Japan due to Values Dissonance.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Director and writer Isao Takahata asserting that the film is not an anti-war film is a little baffling considering the subject matter.^note  His reasoning being that he didn’t want the movie to be used as propaganda.
• The Woobie:
  • Setsuko and Seita's mother. She left to seek safety during the bombings by heading to a shelter alone. Unfortunately, she was caught in the blast and was burned beyond recognition. She later succumbed to her injuries.
  • Poor, sweet, little Setsuko. She was an innocent young girl who lost her mother to the bombings. She was then forced to stay with her aunt, who resented both her and her brother. After Seita decided to run away, Setsuko would ultimately die from malnourishment just as Seita was able to feed her some watermelon.

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