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Three-quarters of Pica-don is peaceful Japanese people going about their peaceful Japanese duties. The other quarter is Japanese people melting and fusing into skinless, lifeless, monstrous creatures.

Pica-don attempts to describe the indescribable shock and horror the atomic bomb brought to Japan. It is a worthy attempt, with a style that begins as smoothly and cleanly as a propaganda film then melts into surrealism. It's not the best of the Hiroshima anime memoirs out today - with seven minutes and no dialogue, it's difficult to portray any real emotion - but it's the first. And because it manages to be so hard to watch, it's a ... definite must-see.

Someone I'd very much like to meet in the nun-run Catholic elementary school I attended put this on a VHS with Disney's The Little Mermaid, and so I first watched the two in a marathon on a day the teacher was out. Being precociously pretentious, I was irritated at how little the Disney version resembled the Andersen fairy tale I loved and slept through it. Then came this anime. I was enthralled. The characters and backgrounds were beautiful in a graceful, idealized way I'd never seen before. The ending, especially, was beautiful in a way I'd never envisioned in all those readings.

That school was forced ... to close recently and the librarian asked me to take as many things as I could from the library. After wandering around like the oft-mentioned kid in a candy store, I was surprised to find that the VHS I had watched was still in the rack. I figured I had really lucked out and watched it at the first chance I had.

Yes, it was indeed childlike innocence that let me be so entranced by this movie when I first saw it. The animation, although better than a lot of others in its time period, is often stiff and flat. The story isn't really as accurate to the story as I had thought, and in fact seems closer to the Disney version - which is pretty strange, considering that this was made first. The dub is pretty awful, especially the performance of the main character, who seems to really enjoy filling mouth flaps with bizarrely pornographic "oh"s.

But the art style is still beautiful, and the story is still much more interesting than the Disneyfied version. If you have a little girl around, I'd suggest showing her this old gem instead. I'm sure she'll be entraced.