My Oni Girl Review: A Completely Average Demon-ination
Title: My Oni Girl
Director: Tomotaka Shibayama
Release Date: May 24 2024
Summary
Pushover high school student, Hiiragi (Kensho Ono/Michael Johnston), keeps struggling with making friends. When he meets the oni girl, Tsumugi (Miyu Tomita/Victoria T. Washington), his life goes upside down as they have an odd partnership. She came to the human world in the first place to look for her mother. Throughout their adventure, they go through a lot of self-discovery about their own lives.
Reasons
The biggest strengths of My Oni Girl are the colorful animation and the simple but endearing heart. Its animation company is Studio Colorido (Penguin Highway, A Whisker Away, and Drifting Home) which is the reason why the movie looks aesthetically pleasing and realistic. Mostly, the color palette and art style pop out to match the cutesy tones of the plot. Speaking of art style, the simplistic eyes and character looks are a nice touch. All of the backgrounds look nice but the home of the onis would have looked more lovely. Even though it is not written realistically, the heart is still fine enough to make the audience smile. The character chemistries, notably Hiiragi and Tsumugi's interactions, are a big highlight as they discover about themselves and support each other throughout the journey. However, the best heartwarming part of the movie would rather be the reunion in the third act instead, because of how emotional some tiny plot points got before that.
Besides the aesthetics, My Oni Girl's soundtrack and voice talent are its additional strengths to make the movie pleasant. Although the vocal tracks are minimal, the score is calm and pleasing. It fits both the cute vibe of the movie and the human-and-demon friendship between Hiiragi and Tsumugi. The theme song of the movie, "Truth in Lies" by Zutomayo, is catchy and emotional to listen to. Even Zutomayo's experience of being semi-viral on YouTube helps with them being talented enough to sing the song. In addition, the movie also has some great voice talent, although it is not really impressive. Kensho Ono did a good job at voicing Hiiragi in the sense of him being a realistic Japanese teenager. The rest of the cast, like Miyu Tomita as Tsumugi, also did a great job at voicing their roles to make the characters pop. Note that even though the summary mentioned the English dub's voice cast, this is more focused on the original English subbed version.
What makes My Oni Girl far from perfect is its formulaic story, dull writing and execution, and mixed character writing. As pointed out by most reviewers who saw the movie, it uses the story of a boy and a strange girl encountering each other during a quest. This is an overused plotline in most well-known anime movies, like Bubble, as well as a fair share of anime TV shows (i.e. Darling in the Franxx and Elfen Lied). Thankfully, there is no falling in love involved because it focuses more on friendship and family. To compliment the clichéd story, it also has dull writing and execution, such as slow pacing and predictability. If the movie is just going to be a simple story about a boy and a girl, then why does it need to be slow and steady at a 1 hour and 44 minute runtime? Also, the character writing is not bad or terrible by any means but it is rather mixed. Sure, the main leads are well-written but they, along with the supporting characters, do not have enough depth. Plus, they are reliant on being the stereotypical roles of the characters in this kind of plotline.
Conclusion
My Oni Girl might have had some colorful and heartwarming magic but the unoriginality of the story and characters prevents it from being the oni kind of magical. Yes, the animation and heart are well-done due to being made by Studio Colorido. Its calming soundtrack and voice performances are also pluses to ensure it is not terrible. However, the writers might need to fix the story and writing by being more creative with its plotline. Many anime use the boy and girl story nowadays which is getting very old fast. Even though this is not a bad movie, you may give this a try but beware that there are some more sparkling ones out there.
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