81 years on, 'Grave of the Fireflies' still haunts 21 September

"September 21, 1945... that was the night I died."

Still from Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Photo: Collected

A ghost says these words. He is 14. His body lies in a station while the living hurry past. Isao Takahata shows Seita dead in the very first shot, allowing us to glimpse his sister's fate before we even know her name. Then he asks us to love them anyway.

It is 21 September again as I write this. Eighty-one years have passed.

Some Studio Ghibli films you can recommend to almost anyone. My Neighbour Totoro. Castle in the Sky. Even Porco Rosso leaves you with a certain warmth despite its heavier themes.

Grave of the Fireflies is different.

I would urge everyone to watch it once. I would also understand if nobody ever wanted to watch it twice. And that is certainly not a criticism. It may be the highest compliment the film can earn.

Isao Takahata's film opened in Japan on 16 April 1988 as a double feature with Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro. One film celebrated childhood. The other watched children starve. 

The pairing was reportedly a commercial calculation: Totoro looked like a gamble, and the studio hoped a sober slice of wartime history would bring families to the cinema.

Seita spent the film trying to protect Setsuko from a world that had already failed her. Photo: Collected

Takahata adapted Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical story, which first appeared in October 1967 and later won Nosaka the Naoki Prize. Seita is 14 and Setsuko is four. After the firebombing of Kobe destroys their home and kills their mother, the siblings must survive on their own.

The film opens on 21 September 1945 with Seita dying of hunger at Sannomiya Station. A janitor finds a candy tin containing Setsuko's ashes. Then the two spirits rise among a cloud of fireflies.

We know the ending within minutes.

Takahata uses that knowledge not to lessen the suspense, but to create dread. You are almost certain to be in tears before the story has properly begun.

Beauty that sharpens the pain

The first surprise is how beautiful the film looks.

Its hand-drawn textures are rich and its light has a dreamlike glow. That beauty never softens the horror. Instead, it deepens it, adding more texture and emotional weight to what we are watching.

The air raids are loud and chaotic. Then Michio Mamiya's music steps back and silence does the work.

The siblings hold it together. Seita is still a child, yet must somehow keep his younger sister alive. Setsuko is too young to understand the world collapsing around her.

They play on the beach. They sing in the rain beneath a makeshift umbrella. They make a home in an abandoned shelter.

For brief moments, they are simply children.

We meet no generals and follow no soldiers. War arrives as hunger, loss and the slow death of hope.

The fireflies carry the film's central image: something beautiful, fleeting and already doomed.

For one night, Seita and Setsuko had their own little sky. Photo: Collected

There are no conventional villains here. The aunt is perhaps the clearest example. As the children become increasingly dependent on her, she begins to treat them as a burden.

It is horrible to watch. It is also true to how scarcity can behave. Fear breeds selfishness. Resentment grows when food runs short.Seita's pride makes things worse. He waits too long to ask for help. He leaves his aunt's house when staying might have saved Setsuko. Yet he is also a boy doing his clumsy best in circumstances no child should have to navigate.

Historian David Conrad notes the case of a doctor who diagnoses Setsuko's malnutrition but sends the children away without medicine or food.

The story behind the story

The story behind the story makes the film even more painful.

Nosaka wrote Grave of the Fireflies as a personal apology to Keiko, his adoptive younger sister, who died of malnutrition. She was only 16 months old.

Nosaka was not the devoted older brother that Seita became. He kept parts of the truth vague for years, and accounts of his life say that he sometimes ate her share of the food.

Seita is the brother Nosaka wished he had been.

Nosaka survived the war. It is difficult not to read the story as a sentence the author passed on himself.

Is it an anti-war film?

Most viewers would probably call Grave of the Fireflies an anti-war film.

Takahata did not.

He rejected the label until his death in 2018. His argument was that a film cannot stop the next war. He said he wanted to show a brother and sister failing because they had been cut off from society.

Both readings can stand together.

War is the pressure. A society that stops caring is the wound.

The fireflies were beautiful precisely because they were temporary. Photo: Collected

For many Western viewers, the film also corrects a blind spot in popular memory of the Pacific War, which often centres on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The firebombing of Japanese cities killed hundreds of thousands of people. Kobe's story belongs to that other chapter of the war, one that is less frequently represented in popular culture.

And its central question remains painfully relevant wherever children lose their homes, families and schools to war.

When war does not end for children

There is a particular kind of horror in Grave of the Fireflies: everything that comes after.

The siblings are left to navigate hunger, displacement, illness and the slow disappearance of everything that once made childhood feel safe. They hide in an abandoned shelter, search for food and try to create small moments of happiness while the world around them collapses.

Gaza's children are living through a reality that makes the film's question painfully contemporary.

War does not end for a child when the bombing stops. It follows them into whatever remains of their homes, into overcrowded shelters and hospitals, into displacement camps, empty kitchens and nights without safety.

According to Palestine Datasets, 22,432 children had been killed in Gaza by 20 September 2026, the 1,080th day of the war.

The dataset also records hundreds of thousands of people injured and cases of death from starvation.

Behind the number 22,432 are children who had names, siblings, favourite foods, classrooms and people waiting for them to come home.

The horror of Grave of the Fireflies lies partly in watching Setsuko remain a child while the circumstances around her become brutally adult.

She plays with fireflies. She laughs. She asks questions. She clings to her brother.

Hunger steadily strips away the ordinary rituals of childhood. Eventually, even food becomes something to dream about.

Grave of the Fireflies asks what happens when adults wage war but children inherit its consequences.

The most devastating casualties of war do not carry guns. Photo: Collected

Gaza is forcing the world to confront that question in real time.

Perhaps the most devastating similarity is this: in both stories, children are made to live inside the aftermath of decisions they did not make.

The fireflies in Takahata's film glow briefly against the darkness. For Setsuko, they become something beautiful to hold on to in a world becoming increasingly unlivable.

Children in Gaza deserve more than brief moments of light between one horror and the next. They deserve the ordinary things that war keeps taking from them — food, safety, home, school, family and the chance to grow up.

A film that stays with you

The film hurts, and it means every second of it.

I would not choose it over Totoro or Spirited Away for a comforting return visit. Miyazaki can make you feel like a child again. Takahata makes you stare into the abyss.

A second viewing only deepens the ache because you know the fireflies' fate. Every small joy feels borrowed. Every laugh carries the weight of what we already know is coming.

Watch it once. You will not forget it.