My Oni Girl

A boy learns to express himself in the most convoluted way possible, in Tomotaka Shibayama’s cutesy fantasy drama.

“No matter what country you go to or what era you find yourself in, there will be those who can only live by suppressing their feelings.”

I wonder when Studio Colorido, the animation house behind Penguin Highway and Drifting Home, will end up as recognised as Ghibli? At this point it’s released a few movies, most of which have been pretty solid but I’m still not sure they’ve done enough to really find their voice. You know when you’re seeing a Ghibli or a Science Saru or a Trigger product – and while I do think that Colordio is establishing its own visual style, I’m still not entirely sure I’m watching one of their films until I look it up.

With that said, I think you could read the synopsis of one of their movies and identify who made it. Their stories do tend to have similar set-ups, featuring everyday boys and girls getting themselves into a magical predicament that’s actually a metaphor for a personal issue they’re suffering, and this is true for My Oni Girl.

The protagonist is Hiiragi, a high school pushover and largely forgettable dweeb. He’s got a lot of pent-up emotions and doesn’t know how to get them out, resulting in everyone taking advantage of him. On the way home from a summer festival, he runs into a young oni girl named Tsumugi, who has left her village to find her long-since missing mother.

Hiigari agrees to help her find her, and they begin their journey to the shrine where Tsumugi’s mother was last seen. However, on their trail are snow gods, devastating deities who eat oni like popcorn. And … yeah, this is fine. Like many of these original animated films coming from Japan lately, there’s an idea or two in here that seems promising. But also like many of these films – see Maboroshi or many of its ilk, the promises never seem to amount to much payoff. My Oni Girl feels written by committee sometimes, held together largely by its theme of literally facing your demons, and letting your pent up feelings out.

The story seems to be split into two distinct halves: the road trip section, with its quiet scenes of Hiigari and Tsumugi interacting with various people, and the plot-heavy stuff required to get to the third and final act. The first half – the road trip scenes technically do nothing to serve the larger narrative, but they do lots of creative heavy lifting when it comes to establishing the characters.

The more plot-heavy stuff is OK, but it’s not the most engaging. Hiigari spends a lot of the movie not communicating with his father and slowly turning into an oni, and it comes to a head at the halfway point when a snow god flies in and chomps him. He manages to survive, and ends up in the oni village, where things come to a head. We get back to Tsumugi and her missing mother. It’s perfectly fine, but the world of oni and snow gods isn’t engaging enough the same way the regular human world is.

Overall, My Oni Girl isn’t a half bad movie. Like many of Colorido’s films, however, it feels like it has more ideas than it has ways to execute on them. This means that it can be a bit unfocused in places, rushed in others and often paced like multiple episodes of a TV show stitched together. Colorido is almost there, but needs one final special ingredient to make its movies wholly special.

Verdict: My Oni Girl is a decent watch, but if I wasn’t writing this review, I probably would have forgotten all about it by now.

Overall entertainment: 6.5/10
Violence: 1/10
Sex: 0/10
Coherence: 5/10
English title: Decidedly meh
Spirited Away homage: Maybe one?

My Oni Girl (2024)
also known as: 好きでも嫌いなあまのじゃく Lit. “I like you but I hate you”
Japanese

Director: Tomotaka Shibayama
Writers: Tomotaka Shibayama, Yuko Kakihara

CAST

Kensho Ono – Hiiragi
Miyu Tomita – Tsumugi
Shintaro Asanuma – Ryuji
Aya Yamane – Mio
Tomoko Shiota – Shimako
Shiro Saito – Naoya
Miou Tanaka – Mikio
Satsuki Yukino – Mikuri
Shozo Sasaki – Yoichi
Noriko Hidaka – Shion
Satoshi Mikami – Izuru
Hisako Kyoda – Gozen
Mitsuho Kambe – Kaede