Spoilers. There is no way to properly review this movie without spoilers. That being said, I would urge anyone considering watching Grave of the Fireflies to avoid doing so. Here's why:

This film is a perfect example of why reviews and recommendations are not the word of god and can often be wrong. With an 8.5/10 (as of writing this review) on both IMDB and MAL, you'd think this is something special, right? I first heard of this movie when a US veteran I know mentioned it as a "must see". Though he's a cool guy and I like him, it should be known that his service consisted of a few years stationed at some camp in a Louisiana swamp, and he did not see any combat.

First, let me say what this film does alright/good. The story is a solid concept that could be molded into something much better than this turned out to be. The art is great, especially considering its age. Sadly, the artists put much more effort into this film than the writers.

Here's where Grave of the Fireflies turns sour.

Most of the film represents a young teenager in war-torn Japan during WWII "struggling" to keep him and his younger sister alive. The sister is a generic, energetic yet powerless and unstable child. Fairly realistic, but nothing interesting for a film. The brother, on the other hand, unrealistically matches his sister's infancy. He doesn't just play hide and seek every now and then to keep her entertained, he ONLY plays with his sister. As cities burn around him and the rest of his family is dying to support themselves, each other, or their country. This absolute bullshit and backwards-ass thinking kills himself and his sister, as they run out of food, money, and their health deteriorates. At no point did this perfectly capable and at one point healthy young man consider getting a job to afford food for himself and his sister.

Early in the movie, their aunt and some other family provide the main characters a roof over their head, as their home town is reduced to ashes and both of their parents are dead as a doornail. Understandably they're currently struggling and family is there to help, right? They even get fed for some time, though the amount they get is slowly reduced as the aunt realizes this kid has absolutely ZERO aspirations to exert any effort. Obviously this teen with nothing in his name gives nothing in return. They don't even do so much as sweep the floors. Instead of realizing how big of a leech they're being on their family, they take their aunt's scolding as a personal insult to their dignity, and run away to live in a cave. They have some money (which they only got because they leeched it out of their dead mother's bank account), and buy small amounts of food from a farmer. This farmer, the only person with half a brain cell in the entire film, tells the brother to swallow his pride and apologize to his aunt, so he can have a roof over his head while he looks for a job. What does the brother do? Ignores this wisdom as if he didn't even know what words the farmer was uttering.

The rest of the film is pretty repetitive. "Oh no brother I'm starving!", "Sorry sis, let's play!", "Oh shit she's starving pretty bad, I should steal food.", "Brother I'm still starving I'm gonna die oh no"

It feels pointlessly depressing. Have you ever had a writing project in middle school or high school where you want to write something that sounds really cool but you also don't want to put in any effort and it's much more than what the assignment asks for anyways? Grave of the Fireflies feels like one of those projects. It's obvious the writers wanted to portray some kind of message, but there's no message to be found in the movie, besides don't be a lazy piece of shit and resort to thievery from honest, hardworking and struggling citizens because the thought of honest work never crossed your mind. Clearly that wasn't the intended message though.

As for why I don't recommend watching this in the first place, like I said; it's pointlessly depressing. It's not a cinematic masterpiece, it's not going to make you cry, it's just going to make you frustrated and angry that people who mindlessly watched this film never paying attention to a single word of dialogue or story rated this a perfect 10/10 and told you to watch it because it's "so deep and sad dude!" and a "unique take on war!"