Pitekanto

Pitekanto (2007) is a short, experimental film by Koji Yamamura, who's known for making really unconventional anime. The title comes from Pithecanthropus, an early human ancestor, and the whole thing is basically about how humans have always been kind of terrible, just in different ways throughout history.

It's set in this primitive world where early humans are trying to survive and figure out how to live together. The animation is deliberately janky with exaggerated movements and bizarre character designs, and there's barely any dialogue. What you get is this unsettling look at how our basic instincts clash with trying to build societies, and how a lot of the messed-up stuff we do today? Yeah, we've probably been doing versions of that since the beginning.

It's not really a story in the traditional sense, more like a dark, visual essay on human evolution (or our lack of it, depending on how you look at it). The rough animation style, twisted humor, and these repetitive patterns all come together to create something pretty haunting. It's basically saying we keep making the same mistakes over and over, violence, power struggles, all that stuff and it's been baked into us from the start. Definitely falls into that avant garde anime category.