Studio Colorido's My Oni Girl follows Hiiragi Yatsuse, a high school boy who struggles to form meaningful relationships despite his willingness to please people. Things come to a head for the young man after a chance encounter with an oni girl named Tsumugi when she asks him for help finding her mother in the human world. Throughout their journey, Tsumugi and Hiiragi face mini-oni (ghostly orbs born from humans who are afraid to express their feelings) and the calamity that comes when people let their emotions fester for too long.
At first glance, My Oni Girl has all the hallmarks of a Studio Ghibli-inspired game. You've got a globe-trotting adventure with odd-couple protagonists, a myriad of gorgeously drawn vistas, deliciously glamorous titular shots of Japanese delicacies, cool mondo elders, and visionary monster designs to boot. Considering that the film's director, Tomotaka Shibayama, cut his teeth at Ghibli before coming to Studio Colorido, it's no surprise that these stylizations extend to My Oni Girl as well.
Director: Tomotaka Shibayama
Writers: Yûko Kakihara, Tomotaka Shibayama
Stars: Kenshô OnoMiyu Tomita, Shintarô Asanuma
While any other film would kill to be compared to Ghibli in any conversation, it's hard to ignore the nagging feeling that My Oni Girl is flirting dangerously with being overly familiar to the point of rote. It's almost as if the movie knows it can elicit a laughing reaction from its audience by showing any of the above things on screen when a break is coming up. And why shouldn't it go overboard when its animation quality is as captivating as My Oni Girl is? Fortunately, just when the film looks like it's going to be a formulaic cover, its appeal kicks in, revealing a disarmingly charming coming-of-age story that asks its audience not to let their feelings fester, no matter how hard it is. is to express them.
My Oni Girl follows a meek high school boy named Hiiragi Yatsuse who, despite his best efforts to form meaningful relationships with his classmates, always ends up on the short end of the stick in a series of transactional exchanges. . These range from covering for his classmates' homework, doing his homework, and posing as his boyfriend to help them save face.
Things come to a head when Hiiragi, understandably frustrated that her kindness is taken for granted, helps an assertive oni girl named Tsumugi on a quest to find her long-lost mother in the human world. This search is not just a 30 minute walk around the block. It's an almost three and a half day adventure with a good portion of hitchhiking, squatting, and working to sustain yourself throughout the trip.
By far, My Oni Girl's best attribute is the conflict between its central characters and their surroundings. While the film is presented as an odyssey in which Hiiragi and Tsumugi encounter mini-oni (demons that vomit out the people they encounter on their journey and repress their emotions), they are also often at odds with each other.
Hiiragi not-so-secretly harbors frustrations at Tsumugi's brash and selfish nature, taking advantage of her affability throughout the film. This is comically and dramatically accentuated through columns of mini-oni that sprout from her body whenever he lies about his resentment towards her. The inevitable confrontations between the two, possibly the film's best scene, are accentuated when the pair swing back and forth in their first honest conversation with each other.
The film approaches its conflict in two ways: masterfully provoking the tension of past arguments between its travelers, as well as its individual family drama. Hiiragi's task of searching for Tsumugi functions as a way to avoid confronting his father about him taking private lessons instead of going to cram school, something Tsumugi noted from the beginning. Likewise, Tsumugi respectively blames her own father for lying by omission about her mother's whereabouts in the first place.
While the film is quite enjoyable, the relaxed, contemplative pace of the first half of My Oni Girl contrasts with the fast-paced story of the second half. This abrupt shift in tone makes the film feel as if two different films are converging on each other, complicating some of the well-thought-out foundations of its fantastical elements along the way. Chief among these confusing last act additions is the introduction of a cavalcade of Oni characters and their hierarchy in Oni culture in rapid succession, confusing fragments of time-travel-like imagery that are never addressed, as well as the sacrifice.
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