Night on the Galactic Railway (1985)

  Have you ever watched The Polar Express and thought "man, I wish this was about death"?  Good news!

Giovanni (Mayumi Tanaka) is a small kitten with big problems.  He's bullied at school because his dad is away, his mom is sick, and he has to take an after-school job to help pay for necessities.  His only friend is Campanella (Chika Satamoto) mostly by default as Campanella is the one kid who doesn't bully him.  On the night of the Star Festival, Giovanni wanders into a field of flowers while on an errand to get milk and dreams of a train that travels through space and time.  Campanella joins him and the two boys traverse the galaxy on a mystical pilgrimage.

There's a lot of weirdness here.  I don't think anything constitutes a spoiler, but just in case, here's the part where you stop reading and go watch it (available for rent on Amazon --don't watch the Freevee version because the ads will be hella disruptive-- for $2) if you like going into things knowing as little as possible.

 

Still here?  Okay.  This reminded me a lot of The Halloween Tree, an animated TV film that played every year when I was a kid and then disappeared and made me think I had hallucinated it for years.  There's a surreality to it that keeps it from being super depressing but it does still deal very much with death.  The original 1927 novel was written by a man named Kenji Miyazawa as a way to deal with the accidental death of his sister and the film very much feels like it is processing a trauma.  There's no violence or on-screen death but it directly addresses life and sacrifice in a poignant but not melodramatic way.  It's a good film for children, I think.  It opens up an area of conversation that adults tend to shy away from or feel difficulty in discussing.  There's a version on YouTube that is dubbed, I believe, if that is your bag but the original Japanese version is on Amazon.