ABSTRACT
Trauma can never be treated as something that happens to a person; especially if that person is a child. Traumatic events become initiators of change(s) that alter the fundamental Being of the affected and bring them face to face with unadulterated horror: horror that is not just fear but fear added with despair. This horror is reminiscent of a much more essential horror that governs the human and its subsequent growth as a ‘human’. A traumatic event then doesn’t just induce horror but makes manifest a primal terror that every human shies away from. Grave of the Fireflies becomes important because it, in tune with this line of argument, shows that the aforementioned fundamental alteration is in fact a re-visioning of the Real-itself: a construction that is tasked with keeping the primal horror at an arm’s length. The current paper then, through an analysis of the film, intends to show how and why the Real becomes the way it is, how horror features into the real, how a traumatic event ends up re-visioning the real, how and why this change affects children more than adults, and how it becomes necessary, especially for children, for the real to change and not just shatter.
