New column on "Oni: Thunder God's Tale" for The Japan Times

 [Finally resuming my monthly "Culture Clash" column for The Japan Times.]

Indie studio Tonko House's coming-of-age story portrays a multiethnic Japan

Fairy tales usually move from humdrum reality to fantasy and back again, with the protagonist and the rest of the audience transformed along the way. Think Alice and the rabbit hole, Chihiro and the tunnel in “Spirited Away.” But the CG-animated limited series “Oni: Thunder God’s Tale” opens in a Japanese dream world before crossing the threshold into an urban Japan that is darker and far more dangerous.

“Oni” is the latest work from indie animation studio Tonko House, with a script by veteran anime writer Mari Okada (“Macquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms”). The series uses digital techniques to mimic the tactile, slightly jerky movements of stop-motion animation, making its visuals feel intimate despite the story’s dizzying array of characters and Hollywood action-adventure scope: a four-episode, 154-minute epic that blends traditional Japanese folklore with a modern take on racial and ethnic conflict.

The Japan Times

We land in a forest village whose quirky locals are plucked from Japan’s mythological past: gods, demons and shape-shifting yōkai spirits, including a talking one-eyed umbrella (kasa-obake), tumbling daruma dolls and a frog-like child kappa, whose head, true to historical form, bears a shallow pool of water. Each time the kappa politely bows, usually mid-sentence, water spills out and he loses consciousness until someone refills it so he can finish.

One of the series’ many pleasures is that it makes no attempt to explain away any of these eccentricities. Instead, “Oni” presents its oddball animistic Japanese spirits as your average gaggle of American schoolchildren, taught by a winged, long-nosed tengu god, warmly voiced by Japanese American actor George Takei of “Star Trek” fame.

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“Anything can be a god in Japan,” says director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi in a call with The Japan Times from his home in Berkeley, California. “But all of Japan’s gods are very human. I thought we should drop our audience right into that.”

The drop feels more like a plunge straight into the lives of main characters Naridon, a rotund father with a bright crimson body and massive halo of curly hair, and his rambunctious dervish of a daughter, Onari, whose sometimes haughty behavior masks a looming identity crisis shared by both.

Naridon is supposed to be a fearsome thunder god, but he behaves like a clumsy househusband, giddily chopping vegetables while soup boils over, wobbling on stumpy legs and occasionally passing wind. Also, he’s wordless, uttering only childlike emotive sounds, while his daughter is a quick-witted chatterbox.

Onari meanwhile struggles to summon her inner powers as a godly spirit to confront the demonic oni (ogres) that threaten to one day destroy the village. But she is blocked, frustrated by her lack of magic and blaming her seemingly weak and speechless, if lovable, dad.

“It was tough to push that through,” Tsutsumi says of Naridon’s incoherence. “A main character with no dialogue? How does that work? But he’s carrying a lot of guilt around, something deep inside, and through the design and animation, you can feel his pain even if he can’t express it. Maybe you can feel it more.”

For the Japanese director based in the United States and his Japanese American artistic partner, Robert Kondo, who together founded Tonko House eight years ago after careers at industry giant Pixar Animation Studios, Naridon isn’t their only inarticulate main character. Their first short film, 2014’s “The Dam Keeper,” tells its 18-minute story about a lifesaving friendship between a fox and a pig with a brief voiceover but not a single line of dialogue.

Both titles focus the audience’s attention on their visuals, with exquisite character design and breathtaking shifts in color and light. Also, both feature stories about outsiders, individuals who are ridiculed and shunned by the societies they so desperately want to help.

But while “The Dam Keeper” takes place in a pastel-colored European village, “Oni” is a visual love letter to Japan, from ancient tree-walled forest clearings to shōtengai (shopping streets) densely lined with eateries. When Onari crosses into the urban human world, believing that it’s the land of the dreaded oni, she meets the story’s other outsider: a half-Japanese, half-Black American boy named Calvin.

At first, Calvin’s appearance as a yōkai-obsessed preteen seems incidental, a bit of comic relief. He is the classic nerdy resident Japanophile, mocked by two Japanese schoolmates for being a “gaijin (foreigner) who knows more about Japan than we do!” But he soon emerges as the key to Onari’s self-reckoning, and the two characters form a bond connecting their respective realms of reality and fantasy.

Daisuke "Dice" Tsutsumi and Robert Kondo

Tsutsumi says that Calvin was based on an autobiographical source, a biracial best friend from his childhood in Japan. But Calvin’s presence in the series is more than just another woke nod to diversity. Alongside Black actors Craig Robinson (“The Office”), who voices Naridon, and Omar Benson Miller as Naridon’s verbose brother Putaro, the wind god, Seth Hall as Calvin rounds out the series’ portrait of a multiracial, multiethnic Japan that residents will recognize even though it is rarely depicted in media or tourist brochures.

One of the series’ many knowing transcultural scenes is when Calvin comforts a despondent Onari, who usually holds her nose when eating her father’s smelly fermented soybean breakfasts, by sharing with her his exotic and gooey American snack: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

When I first visited Tsutsumi and Kondo in 2014, they had just moved into Tonko House’s Berkeley studio and were still arranging furniture around its cramped 200-square-foot floor space, a far cry from Pixar’s vast gated campus just a few miles away.

Both were starting families and painfully aware of the risk they took leaving the animation giant to go it alone. (Though it went on to receive an Oscar nomination for best animated short film in 2015, “The Dam Keeper” had been released to acclaim but was only shown on the festival circuit, which is no way to finance an indie startup.)

They believed that they could combine their experiences in the U.S. with their shared Japanese heritage. Through their love of both countries’ animation cultures, they said, they would try to create “hybrid” works combining the best of each — a tall order for any creative team, big or small. But by deftly blending bravura Hollywood storytelling with Japan’s spiritual touchstones, “Oni” marks a huge leap toward that lofty goal.