Grave of the Fireflies

Grave of the Fireflies is set in Japan during the closing months of World War II. After American incendiary bombing destroys their home in Kobe and kills their mother, fourteen-year-old Seita and his young sister Setsuko are left to fend for themselves, with their father away serving in the navy. They stay briefly with a relative who resents the extra mouths to feed, and eventually leave to live in an abandoned air-raid shelter in the countryside. There Seita tries to give his sister something like a normal childhood while they scrape together food, and the worsening hardship gradually closes in on the two of them.

The film was directed and written by Isao Takahata and produced by Tooru Hara at Studio Ghibli. It is Takahata's fourth film as director, released in 1988 between Gauche the Cellist and Only Yesterday. The voices include Tsutomu Tatsumi as Seita, Ayano Shiraishi as Setsuko, Yoshiko Shinohara as the mother and Akemi Yamaguchi as the aunt.

Made for about four million dollars, the film runs eighty-nine minutes. Reception divides sharply: critics rate it 9.3 out of 10 across fifty reviews, and on TMDB it holds 8.5 out of 10 from a much larger body of voters, while on IMDb its 5.7 out of 10 comes from a comparatively small sample of 1,600 votes.