Summer's Puke is Winter's Delight

Memory swallows pain whole only to spit it back out again, and life keeps cycling forward whether you're ready or not. That's the core idea behind 'Natsu no Gero wa Fuyu no Sakana' — which translates to 'Summer's Puke is Winter's Delight' — a short avant-garde film from 2016 directed by Sawako Kabuki. The title alone tells you this isn't going to be a comfortable watch. It's abstract, symbolic, and deliberately strange, using music and fragmented visuals to explore how humans process painful experiences. You endure something, it becomes a memory, and then somehow you go through it all again. The film calls this cycle 'Life is Eco,' which is either profound or darkly funny depending on your headspace — probably both. At under an hour total, it commits fully to its weird, introspective tone without overstaying its welcome. If you've seen something like Cat Soup or Belladonna of Sadness and appreciated how animation can abandon conventional storytelling to just make you feel something strange and difficult, this sits comfortably in that space. It's also got DNA similar to Mind Game in how it treats abstract emotion as something worth rendering visually rather than explaining through dialogue. There's no hand-holding here. It asks you to sit with discomfort and find meaning in the repetition. Not for everyone, but if you're in the mood for something genuinely unconventional that treats animation as a psychological experience rather than entertainment, this is worth the time.