It puts you in the uncomfortable seat: watching real ships die, rendered as black paper shapes gliding across a lit screen. This is Japanese wartime cinema doing victory laps over Force Z, the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, and it does it in silhouette, which strips the whole event down to hulls, planes and water with nobody's face to read. There are no characters here in any meaningful sense, just shapes serving a story the state already decided on, and that emptiness is exactly what makes it land decades later. The pacing is calm, almost stately, more shadow theater than combat spectacle, which is a genuinely strange register for a kill count. Watch it as animation history and as a document of what a country makes when it wants you to cheer. The technique is beautiful. The purpose is not. Both things stay true the whole way through.

Rendered in silhouette animation, this wartime propaganda film by Oofuji Noburou depicts the real-life sinking of two Royal Navy ships, the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse. Its account of the sea battle off Malaya is paired with the attack on Pearl Harbor, turning two events of the Second World War into a single action film.