Studio Ghibli animates a rhythm game's mascots for fifteen seconds and somehow makes it feel like a music box opening in your chest. Don-chan and Kacchan aren't characters here, they're the feeling of a song you've played a thousand times suddenly mattering again. It's a commercial that loves what it's selling so much it becomes something else entirely.

Don-chan and Kacchan, the drum mascots of the Taiko no Tatsujin rhythm game series, star in this single-episode web short released in 2015 to mark the franchise's fifteenth anniversary. Joining them is a mouse character created specially for the piece. Studio Ghibli made the short together with producer Toshio Suzuki, and it was also slated to air on television as a commercial.