Film · 1983 · Films · 1980s
Barefoot Gen
Scored from 36 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Adapted by Mori Masaki from Keiji Nakazawa's autobiographical manga, this Japanese animated film follows six-year-old Gen Nakaoka in Hiroshima during the summer of 1945. His family scrapes by on wartime rations and is shunned by neighbours because his father says openly that the war is a mistake, while his mother is heavily pregnant and undernourished. On the morning of 6 August the atomic bomb detonates above the city, and the film renders the blast and the burned landscape in graphic detail before settling into Gen's efforts to feed his mother and newborn sister amid the ruins, the black rain and the first cases of radiation sickness.
Released in 1983, Barefoot Gen is an animation, biography and drama film. It plays in Japanese. Its country of origin is listed as Japan. It runs 1h 23m.
Only 36 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 36 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Barefoot Gen lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 36.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
