This one puts you back in a dark bedroom at age six, staring at the wall while the shadows rearrange themselves into something that might be a person. Nonoko is just trying to go to sleep, and the whole OVA lives in that hinge moment between the light play on the wall and whatever's on the other side of it. It's abstract without being incoherent, which is the hard trick: the imagery goes fully dreamscape, all saturated color and shifting shapes, but you never lose the thread of what's happening. The Christmas music underneath it does more emotional work than most shows manage with an entire cast. Fair warning, the plot is thin and Nonoko is more a vessel than a character, so if you need arcs and stakes, keep walking. If you watch anime for texture and mood, this is twenty minutes of somebody remembering exactly what a child's ceiling looks like at night.

A child named Nonoko lies in bed as darkness creeps across her bedroom. As she gets ready to sleep, the light and shadow falling on the things hanging on her wall start to look a little like a person, and one night she finds a fairy in her room. The story is a small fantasy in the spirit of Alice in Wonderland. The single OVA episode runs about eleven minutes and is credited to Kouji Morimoto. Studio 4°C made it in 1995 for Nippon Computer Arts to show off a technique for blending 2D animation with 3D effects.