I Watch Movies: Okko's Inn

Okko’s Inn

Okko is a schoolkid (the Japanese novel series this film is based on is called “The Junior Innkeeper Is A Grade Schooler”) and is involved in a car crash. She is saved by a vision of a boy but her parents are killed and she goes to live with her grandmother who keeps an inn in a hot spring resort. The ghost inspires her to become the junior innkeeper.

The inn is for healing and welcomes everyone and Okko gets into doing the work there. She has a rival from school, whose family has a much bigger inn. It turns out she has a ghost as well, who she can’t see but Okko can. Also there is a demon who steals food.

Almost at this moment Okko makes friends and finds fulfilment in working as the junior innkeeper and come to terms with her parents’ deaths. And she stops seeing the ghosts so much. Eventually it comes to a climax at the local festival; she and her rival make up, they do the dance that her parents admired, the inn succeeds (one of the first customers she brings in and helps is a journalist and writes it up and the cute picture of the junior innkeeper attracts people) and the ghosts move on.

It’s kind of cute considering it has to confront some serious topics (for kids at least), and also feels quite rushed, with the demon only just making an appearance before the supernatural starts to fade. A fairly good Japanese cartoon for kids but I don’t quite know where to put the suggested age considering that death of parents is the heart of it.

Watch This: A cute and occasionally dark Japanese children’s cartoon that’s a little more accessible and less oblique than many
Don’t Watch This: Ghosts are too frivolous and dead parents too sad