It doesn't grab you, it waits for you, and an hour later you're the one who's been quietly taken apart. This is Tsuboi Sakae's book handled by two very different sets of hands at once: Akio Jissoji shooting the live action, Shigetsugu Yoshida running the animation, and the seam between the two doing work that neither mode could pull off alone. The title is the arithmetic that ruins you, twelve children, twenty-four eyes, counted up front so you feel every subtraction later. And the politics aren't decoration, Tsuboi wrote this out of Japan's anarchist counterculture and her opposition to Korean War rearmament, which is why the grief here has a target instead of just a mood. It's a one-off 1980 TV special almost nobody brings up, which is exactly the kind of thing that outlives the stuff everybody argues about. Watch it once and the classroom roll call never sounds neutral again.

Nijuushi no Hitomi is a 1980 drama special made for television, adapted from a novel by Tsuboi Sakae. The production blends live-action footage, directed by Akio Jissoji, with animated segments by Shigetsugu Yoshida. The source book reflects the author's ties to Japan's anarchist counterculture and her stand against rearmament during the Korean War. The same novel was earlier filmed in live action by Keisuke Kinoshita in 1954, and the story was remade in 1987 as the live-action film Children on the Island.