To each his own, I suppose. I prefer Roger Ebert’s closing statement in his 2000 review: “Because it is animated and from Japan, ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ has been little seen. When anime fans say how good the film is, nobody takes them seriously. Now that it’s available on DVD with a choice of subtitles or English…

The two children are dying because they’re starving to death and experiencing sickness from fallout. That is inherently “suffering” and it doesn’t matter whether it’s one set of children or the other (that criticism could be levied at any film’s characters). The deaths themselves are only incidental to the end of the…