Grave Of The Fireflies Roger Ebert Hot! -

There is no villain here. No evil general, no snarling American pilot. The enemy is the math of scarcity. The villain is the logic that says an orphan is less valuable than a farmer. Seita’s fatal flaw is not pride, but love. He gives Setsuko his share of the food, drains his own life into her, and watches helplessly as she slips away. The famous, devastating final montage—Setsuko playing alone in the cave, hallucinating, cutting a tombstone for her imaginary feast—is not manipulative. It is simply the truth.

Roger Ebert’s Rule of thumb: A great film is one that allows you to see the world through another’s eyes. Grave of the Fireflies forces you to see through the eyes of a helpless child. The animation becomes a tool of unbearable intimacy. When Setsuko sucks on a marble and pretends it’s a candy, we don’t see a drawing; we see a child’s imagination cannibalizing itself to survive. When she finally makes a “rice ball” out of mud and clay, eating it with desperate, theatrical delight, the screen blurs. That is the moment you realize you are crying. grave of the fireflies roger ebert

BY ROGER EBERT / April 8, 1988

The story is brutally simple. After their mother is horrifically burned to death in a firebombing—her bandaged, maggot-ridden body a shocking image for any medium, let alone animation—Seita and Setsuko move in with a distant aunt. The aunt is not a monster. She is worse: she is practical. As rations shrink and the war effort fails, her kindness curdles into passive-aggressive resentment. “You eat our rice but do nothing for the war,” she seethes. Seita, too proud and too young to beg, takes his sister to live in an abandoned bomb shelter. There is no villain here

It is there, in a cave by a placid lake, that the film performs its cruel magic. We watch the siblings play in the firefly light. We watch Setsuko build a tiny grave for the dead insects. “Why do fireflies have to die so soon?” she asks. Seita doesn’t answer. He is too busy watching his sister starve. The villain is the logic that says an