A small fox steals from a village that has nothing to spare, and the story never takes his side. Gon is hungry, desperate, genuinely a pest, but watching him survive on scraps and cunning makes you complicit in rooting for a creature the villagers have every right to hate. The genius is that by the end, you understand both perfectly, and that understanding breaks something in you that doesn't heal.

Gon is a little fox who comes to a village while hunting for something to eat. Once there, he keeps stealing the villagers' food and stirring up other trouble, and though they grow angry with him, he always manages to slip away. The 1985 film adapts a well-known Japanese children's tale by Nankichi Niimi, a writer sometimes likened to Hans Christian Andersen.