Twelve minutes, not a single line of dialogue, and it still lands harder than most full seasons. Miyazaki lets Joe Hisaishi's arrangement of Vivaldi's La Folia do all the talking, so the whole thing plays like a music box winding tighter: the drip of the mill, Baba Yaga looming over her trough, the Egg Princess hauling water with arms too small for the job. Then the dough breathes, swells, and stands up, and the animation goes gloriously gooey, weight and stretch drawn by hand in a way nobody bothers with anymore. It is cozy and quietly frightening in the same frame, a fairy tale about drudgery that only offers escape at daybreak. The cruelest part is that it lives at the Ghibli Museum and Ghibli Park, no stream, no disc, so seeing it means buying a plane ticket and sitting in the dark with strangers.

Deep in a thorny forest stands an isolated water mill where a witch named Baba Yaga holds an Egg Princess captive, forcing the tiny girl to do all the hard work. One night, a batch of dough left in a trough comes to life, awakened by the witch's magic. Afraid of the witch, the Egg Princess and her new companion resolve to run away together. What lies ahead for the pair remains uncertain. The short fantasy adventure is based on an original story by Hayao Miyazaki and was made to screen at the Ghibli Museum. It is set to Joe Hisaishi's arrangement of Vivaldi's La Folia.