I remember watching a DVD growing up in France in the early 2000s; it was an anthology of animated shorts. My memory of them is that they might not have been super children friendly – definitely somewhat bleak. I don’t know if they were Japanese or American & dubbed or French. I’d lean towards Japanese.

One of the shorts I remember involved a society that collectively decided to all take a pill that allowed them to read each other’s minds, thinking this would solve all of society’s problems or something. I distinctly remember a scene with a political speech in front of a crowd and then all the crowd being shown as taking this pill from a cup or glass.

What ended up happening is being able to read minds lead to everyone hating each other – there was a scene of a couple having a fight without speaking at the dinner table. So everyone had to start living alone and far away from others (as the mind reading only works within a certain range?).

The protagonist of the short is a foreigner travelling on a motorcycle who drives through this place and ends up hearing the story of what happened from a woman who is initially taken aback by the fact she can’t read his mind.

Another one of the shorts I remember less distinctly, but it definitely involved children in some way, and the ending was during a particularly harsh and snowy winter where food was scarce, we see a butcher’s truck or just a truck with meat cuts hanging from hooks inside, and it’s implied that the children were killed to be eaten?