In the weeks following my viewing of Grave of the Fireflies, I had, almost obsessively, ruminated the story over and over in my mind. The only thing I wanted to do was talk to other people about it. It was like an awful secret I was keeping that had to be told, or an uncertainty that I wanted peer-approval for. So I told my family about the film. I wanted to see their reactions even from what I retold of the story. Dad shuddered, my sister grimaced; and my friends thought I was sadistic for finding such a strange Japanese “thriller”.

I thoroughly questioned my work colleague; a rather cynical divorcee who spends his life doing “as little as possible”, and is the source of my entire (pirated) collection of films and television shows. Seeing as he had put me on to Ghibli initially, and had given me the copy…