Grave of the Fireflies: A Heartbreaking Tale of War and Sibling Love

 

 This movie opens up in Kobe, right at the tail end of the war. The Americans are bombing the city in an attempt to get the situation under control, and most of the city has been enjoyed. One family, consisting of a mother and her two children, Seita and Setsuko, are waiting news for the patriarch, who serves in the Japanese navy.  

But when the bombing gets too intense, the kids’ mother is severely burned and injured. Seita leaves his sister behind when he goes to the hospital, and he sees that his mother is going to die. She does, he does not tell his sister this to protect her, then they go to move in with their father's sister. 

Seita digs up everything he buried before the bombings, and he gives his sister the hard candy he buried. Their aunt then takes their mother’s silk kimonos and tells Seita to sell them for rice, which causes Setsuko to have a meltdown because it belonged to their mother. 

They get the rice, but then the food situation becomes even more dire. Their aunt doesn’t even give them the full amount of rice, despite it being their mother’s kimonos that provided the rice, and Setsuko keeps complaining of being hungry. When the aunt becomes bitter that the kids aren’t doing anything productive, Seita brings Setsuko away from the home and into an abandoned shelter.

The siblings start living there, capturing fireflies, but then the fireflies even die. Setsuko buries them and reveals to her brother that their aunt exposed to her that their mother is dead, and she doesn’t understand why the fireflies died so young too.

Reality hits quickly when the duo runs out of rice and food. A farmer tells Seita that they need to return to his aunt, and that if they continue living like this, the two of them will die. Seita then resorts to stealing food and resources during raids, but then a farmer catches him, beats the boy, and reports him to the police. The cops do nothing when they realize that he’s trying to feed his sister.  

But Setsuko becomes sick and weary, and Seita takes her to the doctor. The doctor explains she has malnutrition, and only food can save her. Seita takes out all of the remaining money from his mother’s account, then learns Japanese has surrendered. He realizes his father is probably dead, but when he comes back home to Setsuko, she is dying.

He prepares food for her while she dies, then he cremates her and her doll. He puts the ashes in the candy tin, but it’s not even a month when Seita dies himself. He, too, died of malnutrition at a train station, and a janitor goes through his belongings while cleaning all the bodies of the deceased up

He tosses the candy tin with the ashes into a field, and Setsuko’s spirit is set free. She’s joined by Seita and fireflies, and they board a train together. They arrive at a bench in the modern day version of Kobe, surrounded by fireflies, happy and healthy—unlike their real lives.These are real events that happened to so many during and after the war, as food and resources were so scarce as Japan’s military efforts were quickly being snuffed out by the Americans