Original artwork, not a still
September 21, 1945... that was the night I died.
— Grave of the Fireflies • 1988
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
The film tells you he dies before it shows you anything else, so the whole story is watched with that knowledge in the room. Director Isao Takahata said that revealing everything at the beginning was meant to lessen the pain of watching it. Fans quote the line as the sentence that makes a children's war film unbearable in the best sense: a date, a death, and a narrator who is already gone.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for Grave of the FirefliesShow the scene
The first line of Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Seita, now a ghost, narrates over the opening scene, and the film then goes back to the air raids of March 1945 and tells the story of how he and his four-year-old sister Setsuko got there. The war is nearly over, their mother has died in the firebombing of Kobe, and the siblings end up scavenging and starving on their own. Seita dies of starvation weeks after Japan's surrender, in a Sannomiya train station among other malnourished people. A janitor finds his candy tin, and the two spirits rise with the fireflies.
Sources (1)
- Wikipedia: Grave of the FirefliesPlot, Development, ThemesReference checked
Context reviewed
