I will spoil one thing in this review the genre of the movie a very typical Japanese story of innocent people suffering during wartime. Im assuming you already knew that going in. I dont explore much other media but it seems like only Japanese stories have so many stories that are just purely about their people suffering as victims. So its definitely an interesting viewpoint to present. I would have given it a 3/5 because its the same thing you can see in so many stories not as much recently I suppose but all the classics like Hadashi no Gen and Grave of the Fireflies etc are easily available for you to peruse today. But I gave it a 4/5 because the characters are very likable. Even smalltime characters are made pretty likable. Characters have distinctive little traits that help build them up despite a movie being pretty limited in available time to spend on each character. They also worked very hard to preserve the sense of realism. All the little things from the sound effects to the dialogue. I teared up a few times. I cry very easily however which means that conversely I wasnt actually as affected by this movie as I could have been. The movie starts by making you care about people and then in a gentle gradual process making them suffer but not to the point of being edgy or gore/misery porn. So I respected them for that. It does this realism thing where characters just enter and exit the story their subplot is not complete and things just happen and thats just how it is stuff like that. I can appreciate that. But it doesnt really blow my mind. I can just say it takes real writing and directorial talent to create a movie like this. From the visual side of things it looked very nice. The style was relatively unique. Due to the simple character designs the animation was able to be quite fluid. No real complaints for the visuals. The scenes related to war were actually quite intense and served as a nice contrast to the comfy scenes without being too inyourface about it. The was very tragic for sure but I dont really think it had much purpose in the story. Yeah I know in real life sometimes things just happen without rhyme or reason but thats no excuse to not connect it to other things when its a fictional story. The main character loves to draw but that never went anywhere. It might just be commentary on womens roles in society but they never really said anything just raised some questions that are not rare nor particularly useful in this day and age anymore at least not in the rudimentary way they were raised in the movie. It was definitely worth watching. But it wasnt a masterpiece in my opinion. If youve already seen some WWII stories from Japan you probably wont get too much out of this besides a decent experience. I enjoyed it enough to give it a 4/5 but no matter how much I enjoyed a movie like this I could never give it a 5/5.