It takes the one fairy tale everyone thinks they know and refuses to let you sleep through it. The spindle scene lands, and then the story keeps going where the storybook stops: our heroine stays awake, and what she finds is not a dragon or a hedge of thorns but a man with a grudge and a history with her mother. That reframing turns the curse from a plot device into a family wound, and it's the reason people come out of this quieter than they went in. The animation is the other half of the argument, gorgeous enough to be the whole reason to press play, and it does the heavy lifting in the moments nobody says anything. It's short, it's slept on, and it earns the gut punch it delivers about what "happily ever after" was papering over. Watch it once and you will never hear that phrase the same way.

A retelling of Sleeping Beauty that starts along familiar lines, then turns away from them. Instead of falling under the spell, the young princess sets out to learn about the man who cursed her and how he is tied to her mother. On her fifteenth birthday she finds a diary her mother kept as a girl, revealing that the Queen once had a secret first love. The princess goes into the forest to meet that man. The film questions whether a fairy tale's happy ending is as happy as it seems. A Japanese director made it in Japanese at the Jiří Trnka Studio in Czechoslovakia.