The animation is technically proficient, but here's what actually matters: each story exists to show you what motion looks like when a studio stops pretending 2D and 3D have to stay separate. A white bear tears through an ogre and you feel the weight of it. A sword fight in Edo burns as hot as the city around it. The anthology format means you're not waiting for plot to justify the spectacle, spectacle is the entire point, and that's a relief. Only watch this if you came for the craft, not the story.

SHORT PEACE is a 2013 anthology of four standalone films, each working in a different genre. In Possessions, a wanderer who has lost his way takes shelter in a shrine and finds it full of possessed objects. Combustible portrays the events leading up to the Great Fire of Meireki, which burned more than half of Edo. In Gambo, a young girl asks a white bear to defeat a vicious ogre that has been kidnapping the first born girls of her small village. A Farewell to Weapons sends a group of soldiers in power suits into a deserted city in a post-apocalyptic future to destroy an automated sentry. Combustible and A Farewell to Weapons adapt Katsuhiro Otomo's manga, while the other two are original stories.