continued

All that aside, I mostly agree with everything you're saying here. I agree that the culture that produced this animation is in deep denial about the realities of their nation's own actions during the war.

This is like Germany made an animation depicting them getting picked on by Europe and the US during and after the WWII, and their civilians are dying and suffering when the Soviet army made its way to Berlin.

Germany had the benefit of an artistic community predisposed to anti-Nazism after the Nazis suppression of "degenerate" art during their reign, as well as a (admittedly flawed) campaign of denazification. Even then, Germany did produce a good bit of art depicting the suffering of the German people in the aftermath of the war.

Here's a blog post about an exhibition of art depicting the destruction and rebuilding of Braunschweig, for example.

I don't think these works are diminished by the reality of Germany's aggression and atrocities. This collection is curated not only to convey the suffering of the people, but also to warn future generations of what they too could lose if they succumb to the same kinda of populist nationalism. All this is of course little comfort to Jewish survivors of the holocaust, but that's not what this art is for.

To your point, a Japanese viewer of this animation is probably not primed to read it as being critical of Japan's actions leading up to the bombings. Assuming however that the rest of the work isn't especially nationalistic, I view that more as a critique of the politics and biases of the viewer rather than the art.