Nobody talks about this one. That needs to stop. Kagami is a silent puppet film made when animation was still finding its voice, and Okamoto uses that silence as the entire grammar of the story, every gesture, every turn of a carved face, every shadow becomes the thing you're reading instead of dialogue. Romance without words becomes romance without lies. You watch two figures move through space designed to hold them, and you feel the shape of longing before you understand the plot. This is what animation looked like before it learned to speak.

Kagami is one of the earliest films by Okamoto Tadanari, a silent movie told through puppet animation. It carries a Romance genre label, so a love story sits at its center, and it tells that story without spoken dialogue, relying entirely on animated puppets to carry it.