Cencoroll Connect

The city is supposedly under threat from giant creatures everyone talks about, but Yuki, a high school student, has never seen one. That changes when she meets Tetsu, a listless boy who turns out to keep a white creature he calls Cenco, steered by his mind and able to take any shape he wants. Then Shu appears with a creature of his own, wanting to take Cenco. Atsuya Uki makes no attempt to explain any of it; where the creatures come from and what rules they obey is never stated, and the film draws its strength from that. It is a calm, strange, self-contained piece of work. It began in 2009 as a twenty-five-minute short, the director spent a decade making the continuation, and the two pieces were joined into a single film in 2019. The total running time is still short, and the world it sketches is left wide open.