This one works on you like a held breath. Ofuji takes Akutagawa's parable and refuses to rush it: Kandata down in the pit, the single silver thread lowered from paradise because he once stepped around a spider instead of crushing it, and that long, patient climb upward. Everything hangs on one gesture, the moment he looks down at the other sinners following him and tells them to get off his thread. The thread snaps. It always snaps, and Ofuji makes you sit inside the fall instead of cutting away from it. The craft is the point too, paper and shadow doing what cel animation of the era couldn't be bothered to attempt, a Japanese animator working in his own handmade idiom while the industry looked elsewhere. Ten minutes, no spectacle, and it still asks whether you'd have shared the rope.

A man condemned to Hell is offered a way out when a strand of spider silk dangles down to him from somewhere above, and he starts to climb it in hope of escape. Oofuji Noburou made this short fantasy film, which retells the classic story of the spider's thread in a single episode.