A man watches his dog age across seventeen years compressed into seven minutes. There is no music, no dramatic cuts, no reason for this to work as well as it does. The film moves like memory itself: fragmentary, quiet, utterly indifferent to whether you're ready to feel something. You will anyway. Built for anyone who has ever loved an animal and known from day one that the mathematics of it were impossible.

ash time is a short animated film that marks Hirotoshi Iwasaki's debut in animation. The director built it around his recollections of his own dog, which reached the age of seventeen. A psychological short, it turns on those memories of a long-lived companion.