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My Oni Girl is a charming, emotional fantasy where the details don’t entirely add up. The ending of Netflix’s anime movie in particular raises a lot of questions about what an oni actually is in this setting, and about the rules governing the hidden village where these creatures from Japanese folklore live in isolation. Still, between debates about what drives certain events in this movie, anime fans might take a moment to appreciate the extended riff on Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away that director Tomotaka Shibayama (A Whisker Away) and co-writer Yuko Kakihara (The Apothecary Diaries) dropped about 30 minutes into the story.
The plot focuses on shy schoolboy Hiiragi Yatsuse, who clearly wants to be liked and hopes to be helpful to others. But those desires make him an easy mark for his classmates, who keep taking advantage of his good nature. When he helps runaway oni girl Tsumugi out of a small moment of difficulty, though, his compassion leads him into a much bigger, stranger world. Tsumugi has left her hidden oni village to look for her missing mother. Hiiragi offers to help, and they run off together, headed to a distant shrine where Tsumugi’s mother supposedly can be found.
In one of several episodic chapters in their journey, Tsumugi separates from Hiiragi and is wounded by a mysterious flying creature. Hiiragi finds her unconscious in a forest and carries her to the first building he finds… which happens to be a large, fancy spa and bathhouse. That’s the first hint that My Oni Girl is headed into referential territory.
The first person Hiiragi approaches to ask for help is a bald, bearded man with glasses who works at the inn and has a close relationship with the woman who runs it. He turns out to have a soft heart, and to be easily impressed by a hard worker.
But the real decider of Hiiragi’s fate is the lady who runs the bathhouse — a stern, fearsome woman who says she has no reason to grant him any favors. Ignoring all her other questions, he asks her over and over to let him stay, and to let him work for his keep. She finally breaks down and gives him a temporary job.
Hiiragi impresses everyone at the spa with his hard work, even though he seems to get all the roughest jobs, including a lot of scrubbing:
Tsumugi, meanwhile, has a dream that she’s traveling on a mysterious train with a ghostly figure. That train runs across the surface of an endless expanse of snow:
Eventually, Tsumugi wakes up and feels better, and the two move along, after a cheery goodbye where all the members of the bathhouse gather to see them off.
It isn’t that these images look particularly similar (though the trains come closest), or that Shibayama was drawing directly on Miyazaki’s framing, character design, or visual style for My Oni Girl. It’s more that the bathhouse segment of his movie feels broadly familiar in its story details, and winkingly familiar in its specific interactions. The whole segment is about nine minutes long — big for an Easter egg, but a small part of a feature film, and just one of a number of adventures Hiiragi and Tsumugi have on their journey. It isn’t meant to copycat Spirited Away or draw on its fame, and it works fine as a story element even if you’ve never seen Miyazaki’s movie.
But it’s a fun little diversion once you notice it. Shibayama worked on Spirited Away as a digital ink-and-paint artist, and this feels like a relatively subtle callout to that film — an echo of the most famous project he’s worked on, thrown in just for fun, for the anime fans who might notice.
In spite of all the broad plot elements in common, though, the shot in My Oni Girl that most reminded me of Spirited Away was a quiet, late-night shot of Naoya — the Kamaji equivalent, though he has some elements of Lin, too — vaping at night on the balcony of his bathhouse, overlooking the city. That shot has the same solemn, melancholy feeling of a very similar shot of Chihiro in Spirited Away eating a dumpling at night on the balcony of her bathhouse, overlooking the sea that’s appeared and surrounded the building.
Both of these shots are breaks in the action, where a character takes a little time away from everyone else and from the drama of adventure. It’s an interesting narrative choice to have the equivalent shot in My Oni Girl involve a very minor character, rather than the protagonist, and certainly the sequence in Spirited Away is sweeter, sadder, and stranger.
But I enjoyed My Oni Girl’s extended riff on Miyazaki’s masterpiece, as seen through a completely mundane lens, without gods and monsters. In a way, the sequence feels like Spirited Away AU fanfic — the equivalent of a story that moves the characters into a mundane, modern-day setting, without any of the colorful fantasy elements, but with familiar dynamics and characters. It’s a cover version that doesn’t live up to the original song, but plays around with it in some entertaining ways.
My Oni Girl is currently streaming on Netflix.
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