Unlike the vast majority of Anim? out there HUMAN CROSSING deals with the difficulties of everyday existence. Each episode of the anthology series presents a different dramatic situation and characters with concurrently appropriate animation that stresses realism of design. VOLUME TWO: THE CICADAS OF WINTER collects three episodes of the series. In "The Cicadas of Winter" an actor begins to lose himself in his successful roles; "The Beautiful Afterimage" tells the tale of an intellectual whose genius prevents him from forgetting his troubled past; and finally in "Sidelined" a hard-working journalist realizes that his investigation of the outside world has led to a neglect of his own internal one. HUMAN CROSSING is a dramatic thought-provoking and ultimately hopeful Anim? that eschews the constraints of generic forms in telling its stories.