Kayoko's Diary

Kayoko is a girl just starting first grade in 1940. The film follows the war years through her eyes. By 1945 her family has been broken up and the place she lived is destroyed. What she sees walking through the ruins tells what the war left behind. There are children selling cigarettes on the street and people shoving one another for whatever scraps remain. A boy who looks like her older brother polishes a foreign soldier’s boots. The work rests on the recollections of a real person, Kayoko Ebina. It is animation, but nothing has been softened for a young audience. Seiji Arihara’s Japanese animated film, ninety minutes long, was completed in 1991.