Steve,
Thank you for the words that encourage me.
"Slow loop" is a surprisingly heavy story. It was impressive that my daughter was attracted to such a story.
Yes, I've watched many Studio Ghibli films including "Spirited Away" and "Grave of the Fireflies". Among them, "Grave of the Firefly" was a movie that evoked mysterious feelings to me; why did the main character's brother behave so self-destructively? Recently, I found a video on Youtube explaining my strange feeling. The video describes the "Grave of the Firefly" as a homage to traditional Japanese tragic love stories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ5wnM559iY(Automatic translation from Japanese to English is available in this video, but with low accuracy.)
This video explains that the brother's behavior is "Shinjū" (心中 in kanji), the behavior of lovers killing each other to protect each other's love ([url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjū[/url]). The commentator says this explanation is supported by the presence of the broken umbrella in the movie poster shown below. The stories of such tragic love have been dealt with in traditional Japanese puppet theater (Bunraku, 文楽 in kanji,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunraku) and dance-dorama (Kabuki, 歌舞伎 in kanji,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki). Among the themes that Bunraku and Kabuki deal with, there is one called "Michiyuki-mono" (道行物 in kanji), which are stories about the process by which lovers, families, or lords and servants kill each other for their love. The commentator indicates that the broken umbrella is item that symbolizes the tragic love of lovers in such stories (see the second poster of Bunraku from the Edo era). The above explanation starts at 54:00 in this video. It is also interesting that Isao Takahata, the director of this movie, repeatedly insists that this movie is not an anti-war movie.
My daughter used to learn to play the piano, but now she's focused on ballet lessons.
Best Regards,
Takeru