7 Essential WWII Films to Stream for Hiroshima Day

Across movies and TV, storytellers have come at Hiroshima from every angle — from a child on the ground staring into a firestorm, to scientists wrestling with what they’ve built, to the pilots who carried the bomb. The picks below span animation, mid-century studio drama, Emmy-winning docudramas and last year’s IMAX epic, and they’re unified by one thing: they keep the focus on people whose lives bent around August 6, 1945.

Seven films, seven angles

• Barefoot Gen (1983) — Director Mori Masaki adapts Keiji Nakazawa’s semi‑autobiographical manga into a searing anime about six-year-old Gen Nakaoka in Hiroshima. When “Little Boy” detonates, the movie plunges into the thermal flash, flesh-searing heat and the immediate loss of Gen’s father and siblings, with burned survivors wandering a city in flames.

Another well known example being the 1983 movie Barefoot Gen, which again is a film from a child's perspective of the war, seeing first hand the destruction of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and features some of the most disturbing imagery I've seen in any anime at all.

The above reaction came in a 2018 tweet from Casey Explosion.

• Oppenheimer (2023) — Christopher Nolan ’s biographical drama, shot in IMAX across New Mexico and New Jersey, follows Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer from Los Alamos breakthroughs to the Trinity test. The film never shows the blast over Japan; instead, it filters Hiroshima through Oppenheimer’s cracking conscience as Cold War politics close in.
• Hiroshima (1995) — Co-directed by Roger Spottiswoode and Koreyoshi Kurahara, this meticulous docudrama shifts between Washington, D.C., and Tokyo in the frantic summer weeks of 1945. It juxtaposes President Harry Truman weighing invasion casualty estimates with Japan’s military council resisting unconditional surrender, blending archival footage and reenactments to trace how target selection, miscommunication and military logic converged on Hiroshima. Actor Kenneth Welsh appears as Truman.

I think I came to know of Kenneth Welsh from a 1995 TV movie called Hiroshima. I absolutely loved that movie, and he was great in it as Truman.

That praise came via a 2022 tweet from @SpencerTracyFan.

• Fat Man and Little Boy (1989) — Set in Los Alamos under crushing secrecy, Roland Joffé stages the clash between Gen. Leslie Groves (Paul Newman) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz). The drama zeroes in on the physical realities of building the bombs, including hazardous radiation experiments that turn deadly for a young researcher, long before anything flies to the Pacific.
• Black Rain (1989) — Shohei Imamura’s stark black-and-white masterwork follows Yasuko, exposed to the radioactive “black rain” while traveling through Hiroshima just after the blast. Set from 1945 to 1950 in the rural outskirts, it lingers on the slow-burn aftermath: radiation sickness (bura-bura), social stigma and marriage prospects shattered — a quiet tribute to the hibakusha (survivors).
• Above and Beyond (1952) — Directed by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, this postwar biopic tracks Col. Paul Tibbets (Robert Taylor) from airfields in Utah to the remote island of Tinian as he forms the 509th Composite Group and pilots the Enola Gay. The film balances nuts-and-bolts mission prep with the personal cost of absolute secrecy on Tibbets’ home life, culminating in the August 6 run over Hiroshima.
• Day One (1989) — Joseph Sargent’s TV docudrama centers on Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard (Michael McKean), who spurred Albert Einstein to warn President Roosevelt about Nazi atomic research. After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Szilard and colleagues push petitions to halt the bomb’s use on Japanese cities — and watch political momentum sweep them aside.

I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.

The line above — a favorite Szilard quote — was highlighted in a 2021 tweet by Birender Dhanoa.

Hiroshima Day is observed every year on August 6.