Dolls takes puppeteering as its overriding motif, which relates thematically to the action provided by the live characters. Chief among those tales is the story of Matsumoto and Sawako, a young couple whose relationship is about to be broken apart by the former's parents, who have insisted their son take part in an arranged marriage to his boss' daughter.

A tragic love story set in a mountain village in the Showa era, waiting for a fiancé who died in the war, but it is more than that. It breaks through the existing concept of a film with a beginning, middle, and end, and like Fellini or Godard... Hara Masato's cosmic film philosophy on the theme of "human history and media" unfolds like a symphony.