My Oni Girl Is a Pleasant but Unremarkable Coming-of-Age Journey
Although Studio Colorido’s films haven’t left quite the same impact as some of their high-flying peers, their output has successfully mixed the everyday and otherwordly to deliver a solid stable of work, from the surrealist Penguin Highway to the shapeshifting teen angst of A Whisker Away. Their latest is My Oni Girl, a coming-of-age story that taps into a similar vein by melding the mundane with folklore as its characters battle both arctic monsters and adolescence. While its plotting can’t quite keep up with its fantastical flourishes, My Oni Girl still proves a pleasant, albeit slight production with just enough going for it to appeal to 2D animation enthusiasts.
We follow Hiiragi (Kensho Ono), a first-year high school student living in Japan’s Yamagata prefecture, who, up until now, has done everything asked of him. He is accommodating to his peers, listens to his parents, and is in the middle of being similarly helpful when he meets Tsumugi (Miyu Tomita), a spirited girl his age who turns out to be an oni (in Japanese folklore these guys are traditionally quite murderous, but here they’re chill). She’s left home to search for her mom, who mysteriously disappeared from her village one day.
After Hiiragi gets into a verbal fight with his dad and a for-real fight with an ice yokai, he finds himself able to see Tsumugi’s previously invisible oni horn. Won over by her resolve to find her parent, he decides it’s time to finally break his obedient streak and sets off with her against his family’s wishes. They hitchhike, meet new people and eventually come face to face with an unearthly menace that threatens Tsumugi’s hometown.
Although this quest is disjointed, it’s charming enough throughout to largely justify the bumps in the road. At the center of it all is our central pair, who travel through the Japanese suburbs (and eventually a hidden winter wonderland), and thankfully, their disparate energies balance out. Hiiragi is almost painfully tractable at first, but it doesn’t take long until Tsumugi’s heedless attitude begins to affect him, as the two build out an amusing will-they-won’t-they defined by some classic teenage clumsiness.
But despite their up-front cooperation, both are nursing hurts: Hiiragi’s lifetime of being a pushover has caused him to build up so much negative energy he risks permanently transforming into an oni, while Tsumugi grapples with feelings of abandonment and anger towards her absentee mother. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but Yuko Kakihara’s script drives at both these arcs reasonably well; in particular, Tsumugi’s internal strife comes to a head in a sentimental collage of buried memories that results in one of the film’s most striking sequences. Even though Hiiragi doesn’t entirely differentiate himself from a legion of similar bespectacled anime protagonists, there is a specificity to his primary hang-up, his tendency towards suppression, that makes his struggles also feel palpable, if not as emotionally visceral as his counterpart.
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