There’s an elephant in the room throughout Sunao Katabuchi’s latest animated film, In This Corner of the World. That elephant is the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima—an action that changed war forever and turned the world into the kind of place where a hundred thousand lives could be extinguished in an instant. So from the moment we meet Suzu, a dreamy girl who loves to draw stories, we watch her grow up in the seaside of Hiroshima, and we know where In This Corner of the World is headed.
But it’s easy to forget. Even as the people around Suzu become more involved in the military—her brother, her young husband, and all her male classmates are conscripted—and even as she works to stretch the meager food rations that are slowly starving her family, there’s still something optimistic about Katabuchi’s film. There’s that feeling every human carries: “Oh, but bad things won’t happen to me or the people I love.”