This film builds a whole world of quiet affection in 38 minutes, where a grandmother and grandchild don't need grand gestures to feel like family. The animation moves with a gentleness that matches the story, refusing to shout at you, and that restraint is what makes the small moments land. By the end, you understand exactly why someone spent government money training animators to make something this deliberately unhurried, this genuinely tender.

Mika longs for a trip to the beach with her father, but work keeps pulling him away every weekend, and he is terrified of the ocean besides. After one more cancelled outing, she splashes alone in a kiddie pool with Juju, her inflatable dugong. Then Juju comes to life and offers to take her to the sea himself, and Mika holds on tight as the ride turns stranger than she expected. The slice-of-life film was made in 2012 under the 2011 Young Animator Training Project, a government-funded program that pays studios to train young animators on the job.