Drawing on a darker background.

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2008)

Surely made to inform rather than to entertain, this impossibly powerful animation is the creation, not of a studio at all, but of men & women (and at least one small child) afterwards secure (or possibly frustrated) in the knowledge that their most important work has been done and is not ever to be matched. What they have produced is a masterpiece of anti-war story-telling Shakespearean in its simplicity. For GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES speaks loudly for the innocence always exploited in all conflicts in all places and in all times. No Disneyesque surrealism or anthropomorphising here, just two human-beings at their most vulnerable shown as it has played out countless millions of times from our start and as it will continue to play out until our eventual end. Heartbreaking, soul-searching,... MAGNIFICENT!