La Maison en Petits Cubes

Directed by Kunio Kato, La Maison en Petits Cubes won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, an unusual achievement for a Japanese production in that category. Its gentle hand-drawn style and complete absence of dialogue make it entirely accessible across languages, and its structure, using vertical descent as a metaphor for memory, is frequently cited as an example of elegant visual storytelling. The short runs roughly twelve minutes and remains one of the most widely admired pieces of Japanese independent animation. Its Academy Award win brought unusual international attention to Japanese independent animation.