Summer Ghost (40 minutes)
ANN; GKIDS; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; Shout! Factory; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Fandango; YouTube

At 40 minutes, this just barely qualifies as a short film. But I think it is the perfect length to tell this story. It's a bittersweet story, and one that's well told.

Three teenagers from different schools meet up after one of them, a boy named Tomoya, reaches out via e-mail to find people who might want to go with him to try to meet the "summer ghost". She was a young woman named Ayane, who according to rumors had killed herself, and was sometimes seen in a certain spot when people used fireworks. Two people respond to Tomoya: a boy named Ryo, and a girl named Aoi. They take sparklers to the place they hope to find Ayane, and after a long wait, she finally appears to them. She tells Aoi that she can only be seen by people who were contemplating death. This applies to Tomoya because he's lost his love of life because his mother wants him to abandon his passion for art, in favor of academic studies. It applies to Aoi because she's being bullied at school. And it applies to Ryo because he has a terminal disease, and isn't expected to make it to the next spring.

After their first meeting, Tomoya returns to find Ayane again, and she tells him she didn't kill herself, but rather was murdered. She was hit by a car that ran a red light, and passed out. When she woke up, she was in a confined space like a suitcase, and was buried. The last thing she heard before dying was a train. She wants Tomoya to help her find her body, in order to give closure to her distraught mother. She takes his spirit out of his body and teaches him to fly, not only through the air but also the ground. Eventually, Ryo and Aoi join them in looking for Ayane's body. They finally find the suitcase, which allows Ayane's ghost to move on to the afterlife.

And... there are some important details of the story that I will leave out, to avoid too many spoilers. I feel like I've revealed too much already. But it really is a touching story, with good characters who I feel we get to know better than you might expect, for a short film. It's still a fairly simple story, but it tells us all we need to know.