Powerful, heartbreaking antiwar anime

Rating: 8/10 (22 April 2008)

I watched a dubbed, letterboxed VHS rental. First off, I'm pretty much an anime novice. I've seen four films from Miyazaki, Paprika, and that's it apart from a few things I saw 20 years ago that I barely remember. I've liked what I've seen, but nothing quite blew me away until Princess Mononoke which I saw a few weeks before this; I was hoping this would do the same.
No way to do this without spoilers, so be warned. At the very beginning of the film, a young boy is dying in a train station. He dies, and it is (apparently) his ghost who guides us through and watches over the rest of the film. Seita is an adolescent boy, and early in the film he and his much younger sister Setsuko are orphaned during the late stages of World War II. Bombs level their city and their mother lies seriously wounded for a while until she succumbs. The most powerful single moment in the film for me comes halfway through when we learn that Setsuko, who Seita has been shielding from this knowledge, has already learned what happened.
Seita takes Setsuko to a distant relative's house, but she soon tires of taking care of them and they strike out on their own, finding a bomb shelter to live in. Unfortunately, they have little money and no means of making more, and both begin to starve....the inevitable ending is grimly foretold several times in the film and comes as no shock.
But throughout the film we find scenes of the joys of childhood, the innocence even in wartime that can allow kids to be kids, games to be played, violence to be forgotten. It is the interspersing of these scenes with the physical and emotional devastation wrought by the war that makes for a powerful experience. Still, for me at least -- though I hate to be churlish -- this didn't quite come together as the masterpiece I thought it might be. It all felt too familiar I guess, and I was irritated by Seita's unrelenting (and stupid) optimism at times; it just seemed out of place and perhaps intended to provoke a response that I just couldn't give it.
All in all, powerful but not quite great