You're watching the ghost of what Miyazaki's hands could have made of a dream world before Hollywood told him no. The 1984 pilot moves like nothing else, fluid, strange, genuinely alien in how it treats physics and logic. This is archaeology. It's the only surviving proof that Studio Ghibli almost made American animation look like it was sleeping the whole time.

Little Nemo Pilot is a 1984 test pilot made for the project that later became Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, an animated feature that reached American cinemas in 1992. During an earlier stage of that film's development, many people from Studio Ghibli, the studio behind Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro, took part, and they created this short adventure special as a trial run.