randomNumber7 parent
Grave of the Fireflies is the most emotionally disturbing movie I have ever watched (including non animes). It is a masterpiece but I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone.
It was definitely not a barrel of monkeys, but I think it is an important expression of the costs of war on the innocent, and the effects of societal inequality in general. It's powerful in a way that statistics cannot deliver. You'd also be hard pressed to find a better story of unconditional love, duty, sacrifice, and maturity.
It's the only movie that I liked that I'd only want to watch once.
If you ever do, make sure to do so as a double feature with My Neighbor Totoro (as it was originally released in theaters).
tell me you haven't seen Old Boy without telling me you haven't seen Old Boy
Oldboy is fiction.
The two children in Grave of the Fireflies are fictional, but they're standing in for a tremendous number of real Japanese civilians killed by these events - in some cases literally starved to death. The Americans really did drop incendiary devices on those cities to burn homes to the ground, in our real world. You can certainly make an argument that it was somehow "justified" but it's a terrible thing to have done even if you're quite sure that it wasn't a war crime (which I am not).
Grave of the Fireflies is "semi" auto-biographical
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_of_the_Fireflies_(short_...