My Oni Girl is a charming, emotional fantasy where the details don’t quite add up. The ending of Netflix’s anime film, in particular, raises many questions about what an Oni actually is in this setting and what rules apply to the hidden village where these creatures from Japanese folklore live in isolation. Still, in between debates about what drives certain events in this film, anime fans might pause for a moment to consider the extended allusion to Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away that director Tomotaka Shibayama (Just a stone’s throw away) and co-author Yuko Kakihara (The Pharmacist Diaries) was inserted about 30 minutes into the story.
The plot focuses on the shy student Hiiragi Yatsuse, who obviously wants to be liked and hopes to be able to help others. But these wishes make him an easy victim for his classmates, who repeatedly take advantage of his good nature. When he helps the runaway Oni girl Tsumugi out of a small predicament, his compassion leads him into a much larger, stranger world. Tsumugi has left her hidden Oni village to search for her missing mother. Hiiragi offers his help and they run off together to a distant shrine where Tsumugi’s mother is supposedly to be found.
In one of the several episodic chapters of 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. This is the first hint that My Oni Girl enters referential territory.
The first person Hiiragi asks 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. It turns out that he has a soft heart and is easily impressed by a hard-working person.
Image: Netflix and Image: Studio Ghibli/Max
But the real power to decide Hiiragi’s fate lies with the lady who runs the bathhouse – a strict, intimidating woman who says she has no reason to do him any favors. He ignores all her other questions and keeps begging her to let him stay and work for a living. Eventually she gives in and gives him a temporary job.
Image: Netflix and Image: Studio Ghibli/Max
Hiiragi impresses everyone at the spa with his hard work, even though he seems to get the hardest jobs, including a lot of scrubbing:
Image: Netflix and Image: Studio Ghibli/Max
Meanwhile, Tsumugi dreams that she is traveling with a ghostly figure on a mysterious train. The train travels over an endless snowy area:
Image: Netflix and Image: Studio Ghibli/Max
Eventually, Tsumugi wakes up and feels better. The two move on after saying a cheerful goodbye and all the members of the bathhouse gather to see them off.
Image: Netflix and Image: Studio Ghibli/Max
It’s not that these images look particularly similar (although the features are the closest), or that Shibayama drew directly on Miyazaki’s framing, character design, or visual style for My Oni Girl. Rather, the bathhouse segment of his film feels largely familiar in its story details and tongue-in-cheek familiar in its specific interactions. The entire segment is about nine minutes long—big for an Easter egg, but a small part of a feature film and just one of many adventures Hiiragi and Tsumugi experience on their journey. It is not intended as a pastiche Spirited Away or capitalize on its fame, and it works well as a story element even if you’ve never seen Miyazaki’s film.
But once you notice it, it’s a fun little change. Shibayama worked on Spirited Away as a digital ink and paint artist, and this feels like a relatively subtle reference to that film – an echo of the most famous project he worked on, thrown in just for fun, for those anime fans who might notice.
Despite all the common elements of action, the attitude in My Oni Girl that reminded me most of Spirited Away was a quiet, late-night shot of Naoya – the Kamaji equivalent, although he also has some elements of Lin – steaming on the balcony of his bathhouse at night, overlooking the city. This shot has the same solemn, melancholy feel as a very similar shot of Chihiro in Spirited Away Eating dumplings in the evening on the balcony of the her Bathhouse overlooking the sea that has emerged and surrounds the building.
Image: Netflix and Image: Studio Ghibli/Max
Both shots are breaks in the action, where a character takes a little break from everyone else and the drama of the adventure. It is an interesting narrative decision to place the corresponding shot in My Oni Girl involve a very small character and not the protagonist, and certainly the sequence in Spirited Away is sweeter, sadder and stranger.
But I enjoyed it My Oni Girl‘s extended riff on Miyazaki’s masterpiece, seen through a completely banal lens, without gods and monsters. In some ways, the sequence feels like Spirited Away AU fanfiction – the equivalent of a story that places the characters in a mundane, modern setting, without the colorful fantasy elements but with familiar dynamics and characters. It’s a cover version that doesn’t do the original song justice, but plays with it in a fun way.
My Oni Girl is currently streaming on Netflix.
