It slows your pulse down. This is 1956, Mochinaga Tadahito and Tanaka Yoshitsugu hand-building Japan's first puppet animation, and you can feel every joint and every seam in the frame. There is no spectacle here because there does not need to be any: a girl born out of a melon and the amanojaku, that shape-stealing brat of a demon from the old folktales, carry the whole thing on posture and light alone. Mochinaga went on to become the reason stop-motion has a lineage in Japan at all, and this is where the fingerprints start. Watch it and then go look at everything that came after, and you will notice the same patience in the way a puppet turns its head.

Uriko-hime to Amanojaku is a short film made with puppet animation. It is credited as the first puppet animation produced in Japan, which gives it a notable place in the country's animation history. Tadahito Mochinaga and Yoshitsugu Tanaka directed it, with Mochinaga as the name most closely tied to the work.