Four shorts, twenty minutes total, and it still gets your stomach doing the thing where up stops being a promise. This is Patema's first day: the suit, the ladders, the endless shafts, and the one place the adults told her to stay out of, which is of course her favorite place in the world. The underground community's life is small and warm and genuinely happy, and the prologue lets you sit in that before the story yanks the floor out. The craft flex is that the tunnels are shot to feel cozy and claustrophobic at once, so curiosity reads as danger without anyone saying so. Fair warning: it ends mid-breath and resolves nothing, and if you've already seen the film it's a rerun. But if you haven't, this is the cleanest possible dare to go find out what's down there.

Patema lives in a dark, cramped underground world of endless tunnels and shafts, where people wear protective suits and lead modest but happy lives. She is the princess of this community, but she longs to see somewhere different. Her favorite place is the danger zone, an area the community's rule forbids, and her caretaker Jii often scolds her for going there. Patema keeps returning anyway, because no one will tell her what the danger actually is. While exploring, she is startled by a cloaked figure and falls into an abyss. She wakes clinging to a fence with the sky beneath her feet, as if gravity has flipped. A student named Age rescues her, and the two are left unsure which of them is upside down. This four-part science fiction special is a prologue to the film and covers the first day of the story.