General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The House of Small Cubes (つみきのいえ)

The House of Small Cubes (つみきのいえ, Tsumiki no ie; French title La maison en petits cubes) is a 2008 Japanese short animated film directed by Kunio Katō, in which an old man living in a house built upward like stacked building blocks as floodwaters rise dives through the submerged lower floors of his home and relives the memories attached to each level.¹ The 12-minute film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 81st Academy Awards, the first Japanese work to win that category.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	つみきのいえ (Tsumiki no ie), also released as La maison en petits cubes¹
Director and writer	Created, directed, and animated by Kunio Katō; screenplay by Kenya Hirata¹^•³
Production	Robot Communications; producers Masanori Kusakabe and Yuko Shin; music by Kenji Kondo¹
Length and technique	12 minutes 3 seconds; drawing on paper combined with 2D computer work, in color¹
Academy Award	Best Animated Short Film, 81st Academy Awards (2009); first Japanese winner in the category²
Other major awards	Annecy Cristal and children's jury award, Annecy 2008; Hiroshima Prize and Audience Award, Hiroshima 2008; Grand Prize, 12th Japan Media Arts Festival Animation Division⁴^•⁵
Narration	Masami Nagasawa on the Japanese DVD, which was issued in narrated and non-narrated versions⁶

Spoilers

Story

An old man lives alone in a house that stands above a drowned town. Because the sea level keeps rising, he has repeatedly built new floors on top of the old ones, so the house has come to resemble a stack of small cubes, with earlier levels submerged below the water.³^•⁷ Although the floodwaters stretch to the horizon, an infrastructure still exists that lets him buy materials, and a visiting boat sells him a diving suit.⁷

When he drops his pipe through a flooded floor, he puts on the suit and dives down through the levels of his own house to retrieve it.⁵ Each floor he passes carries the memory of a stage of his life: the Japan Media Arts Festival synopsis describes him encountering the memories of his late wife, his daughter, and other people from his past, depicted in a quiet touch, with the theme of global warming hidden just below the surface.⁵ The descent runs backward through time, ending at the ground floor with his first meeting with his childhood sweetheart, the woman who became his wife.⁷ The film has no dialogue; the story is carried by images and music alone.⁸

Production

The film was made at Robot Communications, a Tokyo-based company producing films and commercials, with Katō handling direction, animation, script credit on some records, graphics, storyboard, layout, sets, camera, and compositing, and Kenya Hirata writing the screenplay.¹^•³ Katō had previously made short animations including R and Diary of a Traveler (或る旅人の日記).³ A retrospective account of his work states that The House of Small Cubes took about a year to produce.⁹

The Annecy festival archive lists the techniques as drawing on paper and 2D computer work.¹ Japanese press coverage noted that, at a time when CG and visual effects were widely used, the film was deliberately finished in a soft pencil-touch style.⁸ The Japanese DVD, released by Robot and sold by Toho in October 2008, contains both a narrated and a non-narrated version, each 12 minutes, with narration by the actress Masami Nagasawa.⁶

Release

The film was first released in Japan on October 4, 2008, as a 12-minute-3-second short.¹⁰ It received a Japanese theatrical release on March 7, 2009, after its award season success.³ It was also distributed on DVD and through several video-on-demand services, an unusual commercial run for a short animation with a small theatrical footprint.¹¹

Awards

The film accumulated festival prizes through 2008 before its Oscar win. At the Annecy International Animation Film Festival it won the Annecy Cristal, the festival's top prize for short films, and the children's jury award; at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival it won the Hiroshima Prize and the Audience Award; and it took the Grand Prize in the Animation Division of the 12th Japan Media Arts Festival.⁴^•⁵ At the 81st Academy Awards, held February 22, 2009 (February 23 Japan time), it won Best Animated Short Film, beating the nominated shorts Lavatory Lovestory, Oktapodi, Presto, and This Way Up.² Japanese reporting called it the first Japanese work to win the category, and IMDb records that Katō became the first Asian filmmaker to win it since the category was initiated in 1932.²^•¹² The Japan Media Arts Festival jury citation credited the film's delicate, nostalgic visual world, a story conveyed without dialogue or explanation, and a universality that crosses borders and generations.⁵

Picture book

The film was adapted into a picture book with art by Katō and text by Hirata, published in Japan by Hakusensha in 2008.¹³ A French edition appeared in March 2012 through the publisher nobi!nobi!, and Katō appeared as an invited author at the Salon du Livre book fair in Paris that year. In April 2013 the French edition won the Prix Sorcières, a leading French children's literature prize, in the picture book category.¹³

Reception and interpretation

Commentators have read the film in different registers. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia classifies it as science fiction bordering on slipstream (fiction blending fantasy and mainstream realism without clear genre elements): the drowning of an entire city takes the story out of the mainstream, no clear fantasy elements appear, and the flooding could be the result of climate change, with some attention paid to worldbuilding.⁷ The same entry describes the tone as steeped in a sense of loss, carried by a muted pastel look.⁷ Japanese coverage likewise highlighted the environmental theme embedded in the rising water.⁸ On the review aggregator Filmarks, the film holds a 3.9 average from more than 25,000 user reviews, with readers frequently citing the accumulation of family memories in the stacked floors and the effectiveness of a dialogue-free twelve minutes.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026