YMMV / Ivan's Childhood

• Heartwarming Moments: The first scene between Ivan and Galtsev is pretty sweet, with the two happily embracing as soon as they see each other and Galtsev acting like a concerned big brother to Ivan.
• Signature Scene: The Big Damn Kiss in the forest between Kholin and Masha, for cinematography alone. Basically, while he's walking with her through the woods, they come to a large ditch and he offers to carry her over it. When he takes her in his arms, he suddenly pulls her in for a kiss while she's still dangling over the ditch, and the scene is shot in such a way that it looks like he's holding her above a huge, dark chasm. Even though it has little relevance to the plot, the sequence is so beautifully shot it's become the most iconic scene in the film.
• Tear Jerker: It an Eastern European film about a Soviet orphan living during World War II, which was not only one of the bloodiest wars ever fought but which particularly massacred the Soviet Union. Do you really expect it to be anything but the saddest thing ever?
  • The opening scene, where an idyllic dream sequence of Ivan's home life with his mother gives way to him waking in a bombed out windmill surrounded by corpses.
  • Ivan coming across an old man in a bombed out house after he runs away. The two have a brief conversation where the old man reveals the destroyed house is his, and as Ivan walks off into the wastes the old man lets out a weary sigh and says in the most despairing voice imaginable, "Dear god, when will this be over?"
  • Ivan's emotional breakdown, where a fantasy of him killing Germans gives way to hallucinations of the Russian children killed at the Maly Trostenets camp, ending with Ivan bursting into tears.
  • The epilogue after the Time Skip. While wandering through the ruins of Berlin, Galtsev discovers documents revealing that Ivan was captured and executed as a partisan months ago. It's also revealed that Kholin was killed in action at some point in the past too. The film ends with another memory of a younger, happier Ivan playing with a little girl on a beach somewhere before the war, only for the scene to cut away to a dead tree on that same beach after the war. The real life footage of Joseph Goebbels' dead family is also rather sobering.
• The Woobie: Ivan, a war orphan and Child Soldier who has been permanently traumatized by the German invasion of the USSR. The only thing he has left to live for is revenge, and it eventually ends with him being captured and killed by the Germans before his 18th birthday. The poor kid looks like he's about to cry in nearly every scene, and you can't blame him.

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