An old man withers away in a prison cell, wheezing as if every breath might be his last. The only real sign of life in the cell is a potted balsam flower. One night, the man begins talking to the flower, telling it his life story — and, improbably enough, the flower starts talking back.

So begins "The Last Blossom," the new film directed by Baku Kinoshita and written by Kazuya Konomoto, the team best known for the 2021 anime series "Odd Taxi." Like that series, "The Last Blossom," which premiered at this year's Annecy International Animational Film Festival, uses magical realism to tell the story of a man who seems like a loser but has a surprise or two up his sleeve. It also shares with "Odd Taxi" a quiet, offbeat sense of humor and a humanist outlook on those on the fringes of society that's heartwarming without being overly sentimental. In other words, it's very good.

The elderly inmate, we learn, is named Minoru Akutsu (voiced by Kaoru Kobayashi in the present and Junki Tozuka in flashback). Back in 1987, Minoru was a member of the yakuza who had just taken in a single mother, Nana (Yoshiko Miyazaki in the present and Hikari Mitsushima in flashback), and her infant son. Despite his criminal lifestyle, Minoru did right by Nana, and for many years they lived a modest but peaceful life, looked over all the while by the balsam flowers in their garden which, it turns out, were more conscious than they appeared.