Thirty-six animators from six continents each took one stanza of Basho and made it visible, and the film becomes a conversation between strangers who never met. You watch the same poet's image refracted through 35 different hands, each one solving the problem of how to draw winter differently. Some segments are transcendent. Some are forgettable. That unevenness is the point, like the renga itself, perfection was never the goal, only the act of reaching across distance to touch the same thought.

Thirty-five animators from around the world unite to bring a 17th-century Japanese poem to life. Based on Basho's classical renga, this film transforms thirty-six poetic stanzas into individual visual sequences, each one created independently by a different animator. Directed by Kihachiro Kawamoto, the project gathers artists from Japan, China, Belgium, the Czech Republic, England, the Netherlands, Canada and Russia, echoing the group authorship of the original poetry form. Most segments run under a minute, and the roughly forty-minute animation passes from verse to verse before giving way to an hour-long documentary in which the animators discuss their work. The film won the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2003.