Grave of the Fireflies [Blu-ray]

Transcends Anime to be one of the saddest forms of any media
I generally don't cry at movies. I love any movie that can move me enough to shed a tear or two. Grave Of the Fireflies is not one of those movies. In those movies even though I'm sad the final scenes leave me with a residual hope that while some tragic event has just occured the charecters involved will grow and live better. Grave of the Fireflies doesn't do this. There is no hope or possiabilty of things getting better. This is Life at it's cruelest. Life that will never get better. This movie doesn't move you, it shatters you.

Seita And Setsuko (the boy and His little sister) aren't Heros and their abusive aunt isn't the villian. Neither for that matter is either side of the war protrayed as good or bad in these movie. This is just a story of people being people. some kind, some indiffrent and some compleatly harsh. Seita makes mistakes that many children in his position would.

Although fifteen years old this film is still very beatiful. The images it portrays are quiet and...
Emotionally powerful, hauntingly poetic, anti-war anime
"Grave of the Fireflies" ("Hotaru no haka") is one of the most powerful anti-war films I have ever seen, which means that it has no competition when it comes to emotional impact in terms of animated films. The death of Bambi's mother was a traumatic shock, but nothing like the sense of despair and grief that overwhelms you by the end of this film. The film begins with the spirit of a young boy showing us his death in a train station, after which we follow the fireflies into the past to see his story. At the beginning of the original movie of "Brian's Song" we were told: "All true stories end in death. This is a true story." So is "Grave of the Fireflies" because I have no problem granting the legitimacy of "truth" to fiction.

In the last months of World War II an American fire bomb raid destroys the port city of Kobe, where almost all of the buildings are made of wood. Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi/J. Robert Spencer) is a 14-year old boy who survives along with his 4-year...
A Powerful And Relevant Anime Classic: A Journey Of True Love And Heartbreak Remastered For A New Generation
Note: It seems a crime that this classic has been off the DVD market. Now this digitally remastered and restored version will be able to reintroduce the film to a new generation.

"Grave of the Fireflies" is a film that I'd heard about for years before I finally got around to viewing it. As one of the most well-respected early anime classics--of course, I expected great things. I knew vaguely what the picture was about and knew that its tone strove for realism as opposed to fantasy. But what I didn't really comprehend is that it would be such a mature story geared toward adult audiences. The sophistication, complicated subject matter, and sorrow contained within "Grave of the Fireflies" made it one of the more surprisingly moving films that I'd seen in quite some time.

The story is simplistic. Set in war-torn Japan near the end of the World War II, two kids must deal with the unexpected death of their mother in a bombing attack. With no one to care for them and...
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