Natsufuku no Shoujo-tachi

This work is an incredible blend of media that uses footage of historical artifacts like journals, letters, clothing, and war footage to tell the stories of a class of young girls who died in the bombings of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945.

The story ebbs and flows with footage of the dead children's surviving family members then to animated scenes based on content found within their journals leading up to the event. You watch as their elderly parents, wrinkled and hobbling cry as they cling to what's left of their torn apart uniforms, talk to them at their graves, and play a song they composed for ... when they might meet again before knowing of their death. It is truly tragic and such a beautiful way to personify the words on paper and help people understand the depth of loss from Hiroshima. Watching them die on screen broke me in a way I'm not sure how to recover from if I am being honest. They don't make anime like this anime, but I wish that they did. I needed to watch this.

Not many people have seen this anime/documentary, and none of them have written a review, so I thought it would be fair to write one.

I discovered this just by scrolling through Madhouse's works looking for interesting shows to watch. I found the premise interesting, and since this was made in the 80's and unknown anime like this generally don't come over legally, I pirated it. I apologize for this.

To my surprise it ended up being a documentary about young girls who died in a bombing during the second world war. Said documentary had animations mixed in about the girls to make them ... a bit relatable I guess.

The documentary portrayed the tragedy in a respectful manner and showed how it affected the families. You can genuinely see how impactfull this tragedy was to the girls families and the community around them.

However the animation and sound direction are what I have negative opinions about. The character animation is awkward and the designs are quite dated. I also have to say that voice acting was also awkward and the quality of the audio was jarring. Perhaps the quality of the audio and voice acting is just a product of the time and it must have seemed decent, but I'll never know.

Maybe these negative opinions on the animation and voice acting is because I'm biased towards the more modern side of things. So take that with a grain of salt because I'm not used to the older style of anime.

Overall, I'm not quite sure whether to recommend this or not. If you can get past the audio quality and animation quality, this might be an informative and interesting documentary for you. If you cannot get used to it, I wouldn't recommend watching this as the documentary and animation portions are about equal to each other in terms of run length.