It gets under your skin because nothing in it looks human, and yet you flinch anyway. Mulan Hua is a high-heeled shoe, and the world she claws through is a stop-motion nightmare of leather, sole and stitching where a baby shoe factory decides which infants get remade into male sturdy shoes. Watch her bind herself into a man's silhouette and grind through shifts at the cigarette factory, and the film stops being a gimmick about footwear roughly ten seconds in. There's no dialogue to lean on, just texture, squelch and the awful patience of frame-by-frame animation, which is exactly why the totalitarian bootlicking and the drunk-on-power finale land like a gut punch instead of a lecture. Every fan who finds this thing says the same thing: it should be famous, and it isn't. A mother's sacrifice, told in shoes, and it will absolutely make you feel something you weren't ready for.

In a totalitarian world ruled by male chauvinism, Mulan Hua is a female high-heeled shoe with a baby girl to protect. When the baby shoe factory moves to turn her daughter into a male shoe, Mulan rebels against it. To raise the child, she then disguises herself as a sturdy male shoe and labors day and night in a capitalist cigarette factory. The film is a psychological horror story about a mother's sacrifice and a feminist's revenge, with a political undercurrent about how intoxicating power can be.