City Lights, Grave of the Fireflies, and the Films That Belong on Every Best-Ever List

Two Films Worth Understanding, Not Just Admiring

City Lights and Grave of the Fireflies appear near the top of serious critics’ lists for reasons that hold up under scrutiny. Both films earn their emotional weight through craft. Neither cheats.

City Lights (1931)

Charlie Chaplin released City Lights in 1931, three years after sound had taken over Hollywood. He shot it silent anyway. That stubbornness alone signals how much he trusted what he had.

The Tramp falls in love with a blind flower girl and befriends a millionaire who only recognizes him when drunk — and forgets him entirely when sober. The mechanics are simple. What’s not simple is the final scene. The girl’s sight has been restored by an operation the Tramp sacrificed everything to pay for. She finally sees him. She recognizes him by touch first. Chaplin holds on his own face for a very long time and does almost nothing. It’s one of the few film endings that has caused grown critics to lose composure in print.

Sight and Sound’s decennial critics’ poll — the most authoritative running survey of critical opinion, published by the British Film Institute every ten years — has placed City Lights consistently among the top twenty films ever made across multiple editions. Roger Ebert called the final scene among the most moving moments in cinema history.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

One thing worth knowing: Grave of the Fireflies was directed by Isao Takahata, not Hayao Miyazaki. Both men cofounded Studio Ghibli, but they made very different kinds of films. Miyazaki reaches for wonder. Takahata is more interested in the texture of ordinary life — and what war does to it.

The film is adapted from Akiyuki Nosaka’s 1967 short story, which Nosaka wrote as an act of self-recrimination over his younger sister’s death from malnutrition during the war. The two siblings at the center — teenager Seita and four-year-old Setsuko — are trying to survive the firebombing of Kobe in 1945. It was released as a double feature with My Neighbor Totoro. That pairing is still almost shocking in retrospect.

What Takahata refuses to do is what makes it extraordinary. No villain. No catharsis. No moment designed to release the pressure. The film simply shows what happened and trusts you to carry it.

Grave of the Fireflies appears less consistently on critics’ polls than City Lights, but it’s a fixture on directors’ polls — filmmakers tend to respond to its technical and structural achievement in ways some general critics underweight.

Where the Canon Currently Stands

The Sight and Sound poll is the closest thing cinema has to an authoritative consensus. Citizen Kane topped it for fifty years. In 2012, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo displaced it — the first time Kane had been knocked from the top. The 2022 edition put Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at number one: a three-and-a-half-hour film about a housewife’s routine, and the first film directed by a woman to take the top spot.

Other titles that appear across editions: Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise. The list shifts with each decade. Some of that reflects genuine reassessment. Some of it reflects which critics the BFI surveyed.

The AFI’s American-focused list and the directors’ poll run alongside the critics’ ballot each decade — and they diverge in interesting ways. Directors tend to vote for films that solved a problem they’ve struggled with themselves.

If You Loved These Two, What’s Next

City Lights sits in a specific tradition of silent physical comedy that Chaplin essentially perfected. Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) are the closest rivals — different in tone, colder and more mechanical, but technically astonishing. Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923) holds up better than most people expect.

If Grave of the Fireflies hit you hard, Takahata’s Only Yesterday (1991) is worth finding — quieter, less devastating, but formally very precise. Outside Ghibli, Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain (1959) covers adjacent ground with a rawness that’s still difficult to sit with.

The thread connecting City Lights and Grave of the Fireflies isn’t genre or era. It’s restraint. Both films know exactly when not to push.