You do not watch this so much as squint at it, and that squint is the whole experience. The print comes to you faded and incomplete, so every surviving frame feels like something you were not supposed to still have: the ape sprawled up in the peach tree, fruit dropping hard enough to leave one crab broken on the ground, the others quietly deciding they are done asking. There is no spectacle here and it never wanted any. It is a folktale moral about sharing and about what happens when you take from people who can outlast you, told at the pace of a bedtime story, with anthropomorphic animals doing the arguing so nobody has to say it out loud. For anime historians and silent film heads, that is the draw. Someone bothered to keep this, and it still lands its point.

A group of crabs faces a troublesome ape in their peach tree. The ape keeps stealing their food and pelting them with fruit, and the attacks grow so bad that one of the crabs is seriously injured. Pushed too far, the crabs join forces to drive the intruder out of the tree. The film is a drama built around that struggle.