Japanese animation used to be famous for being astonishingly weird. An example from those good old days is 1981's Bremen 4, a feature length TV special from legendary creator Osamu Tezuka (Astroboy, Kimba the White Lion). For this fascinating piece of work, Tezuka takes a Brothers Grimm story about four travelling animals and adds in an alien, a robot war, and a whole lot of violence to make an engrossing, dreamlike spectacle.
An alien woman who looks like a deer with antennae on her nose and puffy round nipples contemplates an image of a human woman with puffy round nipples. She transforms into a human woman with no nipples.
She learns one word, the English word, "Peace", before landing in an Earth forest. The animals she encounters are peaceful enough but she's just so happened to have arrived in Germany while a handsome robotic general is conducting a campaign to exterminate the populace. Men, women, and children are slaughtered and the alien is cast into a river. A little boy's mother is killed and he's separated from his beloved cat.
The cat eventually meets a donkey, a dog, and a chicken and then the four of them rescue the alien from the river. As a reward, she transforms them into humans and they continue their adventures across a war-torn, sci-fi fantasy Germany.
This is one of those rare movies that's liable to make a child of any open-minded viewer as you sit there wide-eyed, wondering just what the hell could happen next. By the end, you've been through so much with the animal heroes, they feel like your friends. I can imagine many children watching this movie repeatedly.
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