I need to tell you about a movie that cured my anxiety about death. Around 2018, I was going through a pretty hard time. For reasons I won’t get into, death and mortality were constantly clouding my conscience. They were topics that would bring me an immense amount of anxiety, to the point where I would get scared to even leave the house or would frantically pace around my living room if my wife was even ten minutes late coming back from her pilates class. 

During this time and on one random weekend, we decided to watch one of Studio Ghibli’s earliest movies, Grave of the Fireflies. We’d already seen a few Ghibli films before this, but boy, were we not expecting this movie to be what it was. Set in 1945 in Kobe, Japan, Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of Seita and Setsuko, a brother and sister orphaned during World War II and their desperate struggles for survival during the final months of the Pacific War. 

The film doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to showcasing the atrocities that American troops commited across Japan during this time. But these horrors merely act as a setting, a backdrop to the much more intimate, and in turn, heart-wrenching story of the day-to-day struggles of these two kids. Like how Seita, the older brother, does his best to keep the truths of what’s happening around them from his baby sister and the tough decisions he has to make to ensure their safety, from rationing food to finding shelter. But the film isn’t just about the struggles. It takes time to remind us that these two kids, especially Setsuko, who’s practically a baby, are filled with curiosity and wonder, which makes the plot and what transpires all the more heartbreaking.

Many consider this film to be director Isao Takahata’s magnum opus, and for good reason. This is an immaculately directed and animated film that showcases war from perspectives we usually never see, but in a way that isn’t lurid or begging for your tears, but rather earning your tears (and a lot of them) through the honesty with which it depicts these siblings. Grave of the Fireflies showed me death in a way that was so unbelievably harrowing, gut-wrenching, and haunting that it felt as if my innards were excavated of all emotions and I had no more room left for, well, anything. Which, in turn, most oddly, made me see—at the risk of sounding corny—the light. Made me appreciate this life that I have and made me accept death for what it is, embrace the love that I’m surrounded by and able to give for the time that I’m here, and rid the fear surrounding when it all will come to an end.

This is a movie I’ve only watched once and will never watch again, but will always remember as being one of the greatest films, I believe, that’s ever been made.