A tiny man wages total war against a girl over a single cigarette, and somehow this becomes the funniest thing you'll watch all year. The absurdity compounds at every turn, escalating from philosophical nonsense to actual attempted murder over smoke, each beat landing with perfect timing. It's a 1-minute short that understands comic escalation better than shows ten times its length, which is exactly why nobody talks about it and everyone should.

A pint-sized man standing on a desk confronts a young woman with a traditional Japanese hairstyle, declaring that women descended from tobacco. She laughs at him and traps him under a glass, and he answers by puffing on a cigarette in his pipe and blowing smoke at her. The quarrel escalates: she takes his cigarette and hides it under her book, he threatens her with a gun, she throws the cigarette into the yard, and he tries to shoot her in a fury. The gun does not fire, and in the end the man begins telling her how tobacco came to be. Directed by Noburou Oofuji, this short comedy is his oldest surviving film and mixes paper cutout animation with live-action footage and other camera tricks. Records put its full length at six minutes, but only the first three are known to survive.