A parasitic worm spends one night inside a human body, and somehow this becomes the most meditative thing you'll watch all year. Kuri strips animation down to pure idea: no dialogue, no wasted frames, just the biology of coexistence playing out in real time. The experimental form never feels like an exercise. It feels like watching something alive.

Yoji Kuri made this short experimental animation in 1972. It is a dark phantasmagoria set in a dystopian wasteland of dead trees and corpses, where giant insects, man-eating frogs and flying leviathans roam. Life there is grim and without hope: people are routinely devoured, torn apart and impaled, and some even become hosts for insect larvae. Despite that grisly imagery, it is classed as a comedy.