A small pile of dog poop is left at the side of a country road. It opens its eyes, looks around, and begins to wonder why it exists, and whether anything as lowly as itself could ever be of use to anyone.

This is DOGGY POO (2003), a half-hour Korean stop-motion film, and one of the most affecting things ever animated about being made to feel worthless.

The little poo is mocked by a sparrow, scolded by a clod of dirt, dismissed by nearly everything that passes, and keeps asking what it is for.

The answer comes from a dandelion. If the poo will let the rain dissolve it down into the soil, it can feed her, and she can bloom. The lowest thing on the road becomes the reason a flower lives.

The story was written in 1968 by Kwon Jeong-saeng, who did not so much imagine it as live it. A Korean War refugee raised in poverty, he spent his life in a one-room hut beside his village church, ringing its bell. When his books finally made money, he gave nearly all of it to children, many of them in North Korea, and asked that after his death his small house be torn down and returned to the earth. A man who knew what it was to be counted as worthless wrote the gentlest argument imaginable that no one, and nothing, truly is.

It is a film about a piece of excrement, and it is about you.