This is a puppet show that builds across 56 episodes into something genuinely devastating about power, loss, and the way history forgets people. The pacing is glacial by modern standards, which is exactly the point, you watch entire families rise and fall like seasons, not plot points. By the final arc, you're not watching a war story anymore; you're watching Buddhism explain why nothing lasts, performed by carved wood and silk, and it hits because you've spent a year getting to know the people being unmade by it.

Kawamoto Kihachirou's puppets carry this 1994 NHK television production, a 56-episode puppet animation based on Yoshikawa Eiji's Shin Heike Monogatari, his retelling of the classic Heike monogatari. The run is organized into five named parts: Erudition, Glory, Rebellion, Continuous Change and Uncertainty. The result is a historical spectacle staged with puppets, a good fit for viewers curious about animation done by hand rather than drawn.