In This Corner of the World (2016) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by Annie ★★★★ 2

  in this corner of the world did u mean in this corner of my room sobbing

• Review by willow ★★★★

  i feel like i just lived an entire life

• Review by davidehrlich ★★★

  Every year, on the evening of August 6th, the people of Hiroshima gather along the banks of the Ota River and light more than 10,000 paper lanterns as the final part of a deeply moving peace ceremony. The memorial event caps off a day of reflection that includes film screenings, musical performances, and a wide variety of different speeches. Hibakusha — survivors of the nuclear blasts — gather around the Atomic Bomb Dome, many of them joined by their children and grandchildren. One particularly animated man performs a parable about the horrors visited upon his hometown, while a British ex-pat translates his story into English for the foreigners in attendance. The atmosphere is solemn, but not somber. There’s good food.…

• Review by adambolt ★★★½

  these guys found a way to stay positive during a world war meanwhile my entire day is ruined if i wake up too late

• Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★

  The obvious point of comparison for In This Corner of the World, an anime set on the home front during World War II, is with Isao Takahata’s 1988 Ghibli film Grave of the Fireflies. But in spirit it’s more akin to Takahata’s later work: the world-dissolving subjective images of memory in Only Yesterday and the episodic focus on the family of My Neighbors the Yamadas. Fireflies is about devastation, about the terrible consequences of war and, more specifically, of the cruel pride that makes for such wars, but Corner is about resilience, about a people to whom war is happening, with or without their complicity: it’s more Mrs. Miniver than anything else.

  A little more Seattle Screen Scene.

• Review by Carol Grant ★★★★½

  "I wanted to die a daydreamer."

• Review by djongo ★★★★★ 2

  What was supposed to be a life-affirmingpalette cleanse turned into one of the most devastating experiences this side of Grave of the Fireflies.Yet unlike GOTF’s gut-punching misery, This Corner of the World keeps finding new reasons to wake up in the morning, to smile, to wonder, to hope and to dream.

  Don’t think for a second, however, that such optimism will spare you the horror of reality. I was not prepared for the imagery in this film. A particularly tragic scene finds a frenzied Suzu shooing a white crane away in the midst of an air raid. “Fly away as far as you can!” She yells at the bird, trying to save its life. “Over the mountain, to Hiroshima!”

  The rest is literally history.

• Review by Sebastian Newell ★★★★ 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Me: I heard this movie is sad
  *20 min in*
  Cart: It’s pretty happy so far Seb...
  *40 min in*
  Me: this is unusually happy for a WW2 film
  *1 hour 10 min in*
  Me: Maybe it’s not a sad movie, I must have misunderstood
  *1 hour 20 min in*
  Cart and I: Oh god, oh fuck, oh shit, oh fuck, oh god, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck

• Review by cinemonika ★★★★★

  What a heartbreakingly wonderful story of a life full of wonder, hope, misery and pain. The way Suzu told her story as if she was using her brush to create a beautiful painting was one of my favorite things about this movie. That ending really ripped my heart apart though. I wish I could give this more stars.

• Review by laserviettedu ★★½ 8

  Let's be clear: the unconscionable carpet bombings by the US of the Japanese mainland and the use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unimaginable crimes against humanity.

  At the same time, however, that Japan was the victim of an uncontrovertibly racism-inflected, imperialistic approach from the US, it was conducting its own deeply racist project of imperialism in the South Pacific.

  You would not know that from this film.

  This film works very hard instead to present us with an image of Imperial Japan as a sort of pastoral utopia, with simple, homey, hard-working people just doing their best, as if the war is something that came from the outside to attack their mode of life, rather than…

• Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 4

  JUNIMATION II: F*** YEAH!

  Yet another lovely and tender story set in the midst of a very dark period for Japan, a few years prior and around the nuclear bombing.

  Now this is one of those movies that gets unfortunately hindered in its effectiveness by another movie on the same matter, in this case, Barefoot Gen. In comparison, that was such a harrowing experience, and the scene of the bomb melting and being evaporated by the explosion wave still haunts me. This one has some pretty bad filming, with people losing their limbs and getting hurt as bombs fall down. However, Katabuchi, for some reason, reduces the intensity of the horror, or at least maintains it until the final few…

• Review by Lexi ★★★★ 8

  I don't understand war. I hate war. One moment you're just living and enjoying life, then suddenly, everything is a nightmare. How are some people so inhumane? How come victims of war continue to lose their innocent lives? How do these things start? Do they even have an end? I don't understand, why? I'm 💔