Not as stirring as it might have been, nor as worthy of its praise; the film is, I'm sure, an accurate depiction but durge after durge only goes so far.

Rating: 6/10 (9 May 2013)

I suppose I enjoyed Grave of the Fireflies about as much as I enjoyed something like 2009's "The Road", a film with an atmosphere and a 'look' more-so a character study; a narrative arc or an actual spine. The comparison to a film set post-apocalypse is somewhat fitting here, since Studio Ghibli's 1988 effort often has the feel that the world is coming to an end; that there isn't much hope left and what the central characters have is the best they'll get lest they be dead. What IS coming to an end, however, is not the world itself but The Second World War – something which, if you're in the likes of Berlin; Paris; Hiroshima; Tokyo, or anywhere else synonymous with the conflict, is going to be a lot less pleasant than if you're situated in the United States, or even parts of Great Britain. As a result, towns are flattened; people are fending for themselves; food is hard to come by and to escape the threat of further dangers; one appears to have to flee to the countryside: this is a post-apocalyptic drama if ever I saw one.
Like most of its ilk, story and character sputter to get going out of the fact it's the end of most of what's left in the world and there isn't much left with which to interact. Grave of Fireflies is no different; its elevated status in the popular eye is born out of the fact it's an animation first and foremost, and people often grade such things for its appeal to a child – thus, when something as adult as "Grave" comes along, hysteria and praise will follow. Additionally, it is a Japanese film and a Japanese film tackling Japanese life at the end of The Second World War; a sum often enough for people to see films from certain countries in regards to certain issues sensitive to said nation as being a bit better than what is normal.
As for the film itself, and following on from My Neighbour Totoro, the gleefulness and the ambiguity of the situations young children found themselves in as monsters and supernatural elements ruled their breakaway roost has been replaced by a starker, darker reality. Grave of the Fireflies depicts children veering away from their parents or guardians and into a realm not populated by mythical creatures, of whom are little to no threat, but into the unremitting world of street life in which the reality of actual starvation is very much a threat. We are a long way from the flights of fantasy abound in said example, wherein interaction with monsters and such took kids out of living with parental protection and forced them to fend for themselves.
Here, The War is coming to an end and young siblings Seita (Tatsumi) and Setsuko (Shiraishi) suffer the death of their mother during a Kobe bombing raid that additionally destroys their home – thus, they are forced out and about onto the already dangerous streets of Japan. In Japan right now, the skies are red; ash rains down; the rain that falls in black and they have a mere tin of fruit sweets between them in terms of food supply – they must, however, troop on in an attempt to find father who's with the Navy. To an extent, the film is reminiscent of the preceding year's Empire of the Sun; a superior film in its depiction of a young infant caught up in Japan's spree of invasion through the Far East at around this time, events which eventually gave way to the Pacific theatre of World War II. On top of this, there is a burning amount of inspiration drawn from a lot of what Italy was producing in the immediate fallout of the war; these neo-realist pictures about an individual (plus, on occasion, a companion) trawling through the proverbial debris in order to get somewhere that may or may not be anywhere in particular.
Seita adopts the role of the lead from Setsuko, on account of being much older; their tale in a late-war Japan, a Japan losing two separate wars to China and the Allies, is an interesting snapshot of life at that time, but no more – a piece not offering as much as one would like beyond the thirty minute mark, by which time we've understood all that's been provided and wait to be challenged with something more. Throughout, the Japanese are resentful and full of spite towards the children; a depiction of aunts and doctors, those of whom you would have thought would show compassion, an instance of few punches being pulled by the makers in what appears to be a set of depictions designed to sync up with the merciless nature of Japanese attitudes at that time.
Grave of the Fireflies is no doubt a brave project, with well-constructed, oppressive atmospheres of hopelessness and decent cinematography, but this will only get you so far. The effectiveness of films such as these, projects with later significant deaths and a series of scenes not propelled by narrative but by survival, are often determined by the creativity behind the uncanniness of the scenario, with the likes of 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead scoring highly. Grave of the Fireflies, while competent and well designed, is not a horror film per se; its drama is wearing, its runtime tiring, in spite of it being below ninety minutes and its characters two dimensional (they might be of any age and of any background). Its droll repetition, instead of capturing the desperately sad and desperately slow paced nature of survival, instead creates the sense we're being dragged down the same scenes over and over again – and this is precisely what happens.