Five minutes, not one line of dialogue, and it still gets you. Kanamewo works entirely through weather and sound: rain on leaves, a girl, a tree spirit, and a score that does the job a script would normally do. There is no time to brace yourself, which is exactly the point. The people who bring up Shelter aren't wrong about the shape of it, and the ones who invoke Texhnolyze are reacting to how bleak the underlying thesis gets once you sit with what the tree actually means. Fair warning: if you find existential-fragility metaphors tiresome, you'll call this pretty and hollow, and the runtime gives it nowhere to hide. Everyone else will replay it immediately with the volume up, because the sound design is half the film and you missed some of it the first time.

One rainy evening, a young woman heading home from work crashes her bike and comes across a fragile tree goddess whose shrine is being torn down to make way for a construction project. Moved to help, she brings the goddess home and looks after her. As the two grow closer, the work on the site keeps going and begins to strain their relationship, leaving them to deal with what follows. This single-episode ONA blends drama, romance and the supernatural.