Anime has admittedly been hesitant, to say the least, to portray the very great suffering inflicted upon other Asian peoples as a result of Japanese aggression and colonialism; if the ghost should arise, it dwells instead on the wasting, burning end visited upon Japan in the last days of the Pacific War. Grave of the Fireflies is indeed a story from those times, a story of the slow retreat towards death of two children, 14 year-old Seita and his young sister Setsuko, who, during the ruthless U.S. firebombing campaign of 1945, find themselves alone amidst their own countrymen, friends, and family. Based on the 1967 novel by Akiyuki Nosaka, the film's story is in fact semi-autobiographical; "semi," because Nosaka lived and his sister did not-and also because, the author has said under a weight of guilt, he was not as selfless in real life as Seita, and, having lived in utter darkness, was afraid of "living on in the place where light had returned." As the surprising, beautiful, and lonely final image of the film makes clear, Grave of the Fireflies is not, in fact, about the suffering of the Japanese people, nor even about the suffering of two Japanese people, but an elegy for two souls alone: fireflies, worth more than an empire.-Carl Horn