Barefoot Gen

Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. Gen is six, and the film gives that morning, the moment the bomb falls and everything after, from a child's height. The source is Keiji Nakazawa's manga, and Nakazawa survived the bombing himself, so what is drawn is not an imagined reconstruction. The shocking part is less what it shows than how: the animation renders the blast and the bodies afterwards without any softening, removing every bit of distance you might expect from a film with a child at its centre. Even so it refuses despair, and its second half is about survivors starting again. Who it is for: viewers open to animation that states the civilian cost of war directly. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take graphic imagery, because the blast sequence is still hard to sit through.