New anime feature My Oni Girl (2024) is entertaining enough, but it stakes its position among a hugely crowded field of similar films. Standing out from the crowd seems reasonably unlikely, but devoted otaku will probably find it a pleasant diversion.

First-year high schooler Hiiragi (Kensho Ono) struggles to stand up for himself, allowing classmates to take advantage of his attempts to please others. When he meets the bold and sassy Tsumugi (Miyu Tomita), he immediately tries to pay her bus fare – only to discover she is an oni (a Japanese demon) on a mission.

If I had a dollar for every anime in which a meek, bookish boy shares a romance with a strong-willed, noisy dream girl with a brittle centre needing healing… while I could not necessarily afford a house out of it, I honestly do not think a small car would be out of the question. This heavily mined subject matter is not only aggressively over-represented in Japanese animation, it comes packed with some fairly dubious assumptions about women, young men, and wish fulfilment fantasies. In this specific case, Hiiragi does not seem interesting enough a character to headline his own movie. There’s a temptation to wish Tsumugi would drop him and embark on her quest all by herself.

Folkloric elements will be familiar to any long-term viewers of Japanese fantasy, with a variety of oni and yokai populating the action. There is an intriguing element where those with bottled-up emotions run risk of transforming into oni themselves – and Hiiragi is particularly buttoned-down in this regard – but with the character lacking much in the way of charm or resonance the film struggles to find any proper depth or urgency.

The film is directed by Tomotaka Shibayama (A Whisker Away) and produced by Studio Colorido, whose 2018 feature Penguin Highway likely remains the company’s best work. Visually the film adopts the now-common practice of blending limited cel animation with computer-generated backgrounds. There is a remarkably loose aesthetic to the characters, one that perhaps loses out on impact thanks to the overly slick backgrounds. Masafumi Yokota, an animator who has worked with both Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai, handles the character designs and ensures they are very appealing.

There are some engaging fantasy elements throughout the film, and a fair amount of humour, but ultimately nothing really shakes the perfunctory nature of the total product. That’s its problem in a nutshell: it feels like a commercial product, and lacks the personal touch that punctures through in anime handled by more accomplished writers and directors. There is a certain charm, and definitely entertainment value, but only to an extent. I suspect most viewers will have forgotten all about My Oni Girl within days of watching it.

My Oni Girl was released theatrically in Japan; in the rest of the world it is streaming directly to Netflix.