This one gets you in the throat before you've clocked what happened. Studio Ponoc goes full hand-drawn on a premise most films would play cute: Rudger is Amanda's imaginary friend, and imaginary friends stop existing when the kid who dreamed them stops believing. Mr. Bunting is one of the great modern kid-movie villains, a grinning man in a loud shirt who eats imaginaries to keep himself young, trailed by a silent little girl who should not be there. The library sequence, where forgotten imaginaries wait to be borrowed by new children, is the kind of worldbuilding that lands as both wonder and quiet horror. Zinzan the cat delivers the rules with total deadpan while the animation does the emotional heavy lifting, especially once the rain starts and Rudger begins going thin. Come for the fantasy, stay because it understands exactly what it costs a grieving kid to keep imagining.

Rudger is an imaginary friend born from the vivid mind of a young girl named Amanda, and she is the only one who can see or hear him. The two share wild adventures in the attic above her mother's bookshop, bound by three promises: never vanish, always look out for each other, and never cry. Their games are threatened when a suspicious man called Mr. Bunting arrives with an eerie girl only they can see. He has a talent for tracking imaginary friends and taking them from the children who dreamed them up. Soon Rudger finds himself on his own, pursued by Bunting and facing another danger: an imaginary friend who is forgotten fades from existence entirely. Along with new companions in the Imaginaries Town, he sets out on an adventure no one can see, with the fates of those he loves at stake. The hand-drawn fantasy film centers on friendship, imagination and loss.