Barefoot Gen

Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン, 1983) — watch online on iFILM. Directed by Mori Masaki and adapted from Keiji Nakazawa's autobiographical manga, this Japanese animated feature follows six-year-old Gen through Hiroshima's final weeks before August 6, 1945. His father opposes the war. His mother is close to giving birth. Then the bomb falls.

Gen and his mother survive. His father, his sister, his brother do not. The boy is six, and the city outside no longer exists. What follows — finding food, keeping his mother alive, watching what the radiation does to the people around them — is depicted without distance or softening.

Nakazawa wrote from memory: he survived the Hiroshima bombing as a child and spent decades working the experience into manga, then film. Masaki drew the aftermath with no cuts or fade-outs, and those sequences have stayed in viewers' minds for over forty years. Made as an anti-war document in the shape of a children's story. Stream it online on iFILM.