This one doesn't want anything from you. No stakes, no arc to survive, no lesson at the end, just a kid asleep and a door into somebody else's head, which is a place almost nothing else lets you stand in. Pero is the tell. Toei handed the guide seat to their own mascot cat, the one stitched into the studio's identity since Puss in Boots, for the very first swing of their original project department. That's a house flexing quietly instead of loudly. One episode, over before it can overstay, built entirely out of soft edges and drift. It's the kind of short people scroll straight past because there's no hook to shout about, then pull up at 2am when nothing heavier will go down. Then you catch the cat's name and grin like an idiot.

A young boy falls asleep and dreams, and in that dream a strange whale whisks him away to a fantasy land. There he meets Pero, a cheerful cat modeled on the character from the Nagagutsu wo Haita Neko anime who serves as Toei Animation's mascot. The short asks viewers to leave the real world behind and look inside a child's dream. Told entirely without dialogue, this single-episode fantasy adventure was the first work to come out of Toei Animation Production Department's original projects.