The Persimmon Tree

The scouts

A mouse delivering a persimmon to heaven sounds like treacly animated greeting-card material, but Yeh finds something genuinely unsettling in the repetition—the film knows its own sentimentality and doesn't flinch from it, which is almost perverse enough to work.

The film's formal restraint—its willingness to hold on simple gestures and let silence do the emotional work—situates it in a lineage of contemplative animation stretching back through Takahata; the composition and pacing show a filmmaker aware of what quietness demands.

That decision to let the mouse fail, climb, fail again without musical cues to cushion the viewer—just the sound of tiny claws and breath—transforms what could've been sentimental into something that actually lands, because Yeh trusts the effort itself to carry the weight.