Five animated films place children and childhood memory at the heart of wartime experiences, rather than focusing solely on soldiers and battles, recounting the effects of air raids, violence, restrictions and displacement from the perspective of those who have no say in waging the conflict and cannot fully understand its causes.
From Japan during the Second World War to Afghanistan, Iran and Syria, the major historical and political events in these films become personal details of fear, loss and the collapse of a sense of security. The films draw on the long-standing association between animation and childhood, while using the visual medium to present subjects that are both harsh and intimate.
Colour, drawing and imagined stories do not necessarily lessen the devastation of war; instead, they bring its effects closer, following a child trying to find food, a family leaving its home, a girl forced to change her appearance, or a character discovering that politics can invade their private life.
‘Grave of the Fireflies’ follows two siblings’ childhood amid air raids
In Japanese director Isao Takahata’s 1988 film ‘Grave of the Fireflies’, viewers follow siblings Seita and Setsuko during the final months of the Second World War. The children try to survive after US air raids on Japan, while the film is based on a semi-autobiographical story by Japanese writer Akiyuki Nosaka, who drew some of its details from his childhood experience during the war.
War does not appear in ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ as a series of distant battles; it seeps into the smallest details of the siblings’ lives after they lose their home and relatives. Seita, the older brother, tries to keep his little sister inside an imagined bubble of safety, even though he himself does not understand what is happening around them. As their world collapses, the children try to invent and hold on to a limited version of normal life.
Even the fireflies Seita and Setsuko catch do not remain merely part of a childhood game. They begin as a brief moment of joy amid the destruction, then become a sign of life’s fragility and a reminder of death, which could reach them at any time. Through this transformation, the film shows how childhood is gradually taken away, and how the simplest moments of play become surrounded by loss and fear.
Parvana confronts Taliban restrictions in search of food
Parvana’s life changes after her father is arrested, leaving the family without anyone to support them amid restrictions preventing women and girls from going out alone. To work and buy food for her family, she cuts her hair and dresses as a boy. She is thus forced to take responsibility for the family and grow up before her time, while temporarily giving up her identity as a girl so she can meet the most basic demands of daily life.
Parvana’s disguise as a boy becomes a direct means of survival, but it also exposes a world in which the ability to move, work and obtain food is linked to gender and to the authority imposed by war. Faced with this reality, she turns to imagination, telling herself and her brother a story about a boy who confronts an evil king to save his village.
Suzu protects the details of daily life from war’s encroachment
The imagined story parallels Parvana’s experience, while the choice of a male hero reveals that she cannot even imagine an adventure led by a girl like herself. ‘In This Corner of the World’, directed by Japanese filmmaker Sunao Katabuchi, focuses on the way war expands into daily life. The film was made in 2016 and adapted from the manga of the same name by Fumiyo Kouno.
It follows Suzu, who moves from Hiroshima to the city of Kure after her marriage to live with her husband’s family during the Second World War. As the war advances, air raids increase and food and resources become scarcer, but Suzu tries to continue her usual responsibilities, from preparing food and looking after the house to drawing.
She learns to prepare meals with the few supplies available, makes new clothes from old pieces of fabric and holds on to her habit of drawing. Yet every simple task becomes more difficult, until the war finally reaches her home city of Hiroshima. The film places domestic details in the foreground, as though the war first takes place in the background before gradually drawing closer and engulfing everything around it.
‘Persepolis’ links childhood memory to revolution, exile and the Iran-Iraq war?
Animation helps preserve the intimate quality of this experience; the soft colours and lines that echo Suzu’s drawing style give the early scenes the feel of a personal diary, before aircraft, air raids and destruction break into that calm visual world. In ‘Persepolis’, directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud and released in 2007, childhood memory becomes an entry point into political change, war and exile.
The film is adapted from Satrapi’s graphic novel of the same name, in which she recalls elements of her own life. The story begins with Marji as a child in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, then extends into the years of the Iran-Iraq war and the social and political changes that accompanied it.
Marji learns about war and politics through changes in the details of her life before she can understand the slogans and major events. Her clothes change, as does what she hears at school and what she is allowed to say in the street, while speeches and censorship become part of her daily life.
At home, her parents give her space to question and think, allowing her gradually to compare the official narrative with what she hears from her family and discover that political conflict reaches into the most private aspects of an individual’s life. Marji later moves to Europe, where she faces exile and alienation. The effects of war therefore do not stop at the limits of immediate danger or changes within Iran, but extend to her relationship with place and identity.
The film shows her growing up alongside her discovery that the world does not match the picture presented by institutions and slogans, and that childhood itself is reshaped under the pressure of censorship, war and separation from home. ‘Dounia and the Princess of Aleppo’, a Canadian-French production released in 2022 and directed by Marya Zarif and André Kadi, follows a six-year-old Syrian girl living with her grandparents and father in Aleppo.
Her life is overturned when war forces the family to leave the city and set out in search of safety, leaving Dounia to experience displacement as a child who does not understand the political and military reasons behind the collapse of her world.
As Dounia travels, she is accompanied by the story of ‘The Princess of Aleppo’, told to her by her grandmother, and the mythical world intertwines with her reality as she moves from one place to another. The child cannot explain the conflict, but she understands its direct consequences: fear, the loss of home, separation from her father and the long journey towards a safe place. The film therefore presents displacement first as the experience of a child who has lost her world, before portraying it as a refugee story.
These films bring together characters living through different wars and historical settings, but they converge in depicting the personal impact of violence on people who have no control over it. In some, storytelling and imagination become means of enduring; in others, holding on to drawing, play or preparing food is an attempt to protect what remains of ordinary life.
Through these details, war shifts from a broad political or military event into a daily experience that reshapes identity, family, memory and childhood itself.
