This one takes eleven minutes of your life and leaves a bruise you didn't ask for. It comes out of Shotaro Ishinomori's Jun, the semi-autobiographical experiment where he threw out dialogue entirely and let panels carry feeling on their own, and Takuya Inaba builds the short in that same register: no speeches, no swelling reveal, just image after image doing the talking. The commission came from the Ishinomori Manga Museum in Ishinomaki, the artist's hometown, the town the March 2011 tsunami took apart, and the piece is about that town still putting itself back together. Nothing here spectacles at you. Fans of Ishinomori know him for Kamen Rider and Cyborg 009, and this is the other side of him, the interior one. It's a museum in a rebuilt town saying thank you to its own dead in the only language its most famous son ever invented.

Jun's story unfolds over the city of Ishinomaki as it works to recover from the loss left by the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. As Jun grows, the short conveys the idea that dreams can come true for those who refuse to give up, even in hard times. The film adapts Shotaro Ishinomori's wordless, semi-autobiographical manga Jun: Shotaro no Fantasy World and was released by the Ishinomori Manga Museum, with Takuya Inaba directing. It has no dialogue at all, relying only on music and sound effects, and uses a hand-drawn art style instead of conventional cel animation. It was made as a tribute both to Ishinomori's work and to the ongoing rebuilding of his hometown.