Fortunate Fawn

Koichi and his sister Yuki befriend Hanaguro, a swan who has flown to Japan from Siberia. Hanaguro is attacked by a dog, and the cowardly Koichi flees, but that night he has a dream in which he is whisked away to the Kingdom of Snow Prince, where he finds the bravery to help the other swans.

Researcher Mutsugoro takes his family to a remote and uninhabited island near Hokkaido, to study the local population of wild bears. Nearby poachers make his life difficult, and he "inherits" an orphaned bear cub, whom the family call Donbe and raise as one of their own.

The theme of the film is the love between parents and children. The story covers 13 years and begins with a 19-year-old college student named Hana who encounters and falls in "fairy tale-like" love with a "wolf man." After marrying the wolf man, Hana gives birth and raises two wolf children—an older sister named Yuki who was born on a snowy day, and a younger brother named Ame who was born on a rainy day. The four quietly lived in a corner of a city to conceal the existence of the "wolf children," but when the wolf man suddenly dies, Hana decides to move to a rural town far removed from the city.

The Acorns and the Wildcat is a unique short film in picture-book format from the creator of Night on the Galactic Railroad and Gauche the Cellist. Unusually for an anime, a narrator reads Kenji's story aloud while the action is played out on the screen by a succession of warm and evocative illustrations brought to life by subtle touches of animation. If the film feels somehow familiar yet you can't put your finger on the reason why, it's probably the sumptuously minimalist animation by Yasuhiro Nagura, who was the animation director of Mamoru Oshii's artsy 1986 feature Angel's Egg. That, and Kenji's wildcat is said to have been the inspiration for Miyazaki's Panda/Totoro creature. The idea of reading Kenji's story aloud instead of playing it out as a drama is quite refreshing, and Kenji's magical language and narrative style are entirely sufficient to sustain interest. Combined with the spacey music and breathtaking art, the result is a pleasantly unassuming little gem of a film.