According to Eastern legend, destined lovers are bound by a red string of fate -- "Akai Ito" in Japanese. In this animated short, director Kazuhiko Okushita cleverly uses a single red string to illustrate the life of a man and the woman to whom his string leads him. MAL's rubric, split into categories like "Story" and "Character," is useless for an animation like this. It's four minutes long, with no named characters, no voice acting, and exactly one color: red. Two, if you count the white background. This minimalism is the anime's greatest strength, for it allows no distractions from the message:that life is beautiful. Unpredictably, painfully, miraculously beautiful.

Flawless in its simplicity and a genuine pleasure to watch, Okushita's "Akai Ito" is a work of art I cannot recommend highly enough to anyone with a human soul.