It slows your pulse down inside of two minutes. This is the anthology that raised generations of Japanese kids: two short folktales an episode, no arcs, no stakes ladder, just a mountain, a poor old couple, and something in the woods that owes you a favor or a lesson. The whole cast is two voices, Ichiro Nagai and Akiko Tokito, switching between the greedy neighbor and the tanuki and the narrator without breaking stride, and once you clock it you cannot unhear it. Every episode hands the brush to a different animator, so one tale is scratchy ink wash and the next is soft watercolor, which means the show never settles into a house style and never gets stale. The boy riding the dragon through the clouds in the opening is burned into more brains than most billion-yen franchises. Put it on when the world is too loud and let someone tell you a story.

Manga Nippon Mukashibanashi is a 1975 TV anthology that brings old Japanese tales to the screen in animated form. Rather than following one continuing plot, it gathers traditional stories from Japan and retells them over its run of 12 episodes, offering a collection of folklore instead of a single ongoing narrative.