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.
BY ROGER EBERT / April 8, 1988
At the very end, we see a modern Kobe, neon and chrome, bustling with life. And on a hill overlooking the city, two ghost children sit on a park bench, eating a candy tin that will never be empty. They are not sad. They are simply waiting. Waiting for us to remember what happened to them. Waiting for us to ensure it never happens again. grave of the fireflies roger ebert