It works on you sideways. No battles, no speeches, no swelling orchestra telling you when to feel something, just a girl in the fields of Manchuria and an old she-wolf that decides, for reasons nobody bothers to explain, to mother her. This is Akiyuki Nosaka, the man who wrote Grave of the Fireflies, doing the thing he does best: dropping a child into the machinery of WWII and refusing to look away or soften it. One episode, almost no spectacle, and it still guts you harder than shows with twenty-six tries at it, because the only tenderness on offer comes from an animal that should be a predator. Nobody here is coming to save anybody. What stays with you is smaller than the war: something not human deciding to stay.

Set in the fields of Manchuria during World War II, this television special tells the story of a young girl and an old female wolf who looks after her as a mother would. The work adapts a short story by Akiyuki Nosaka, the writer behind Grave of the Fireflies. It is the seventh entry in Shin-Ei's Sensou Douwa, a yearly series of wartime drama films made for children.