Review: A Letter to Momo

City Paper grade: B-

Animator-turned-auteur Hiroyuki Okiura, who’s had a hand in classics like Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop, offers a small-market chance for anime escapism with A Letter to Momo, a family tale dealing in equal parts magic and melancholy. Full of that revelatory hand-drawn energy missing from many CGI-heavy features, Okiura toiled for seven years to bring about reedy tween Momo (voiced by Karen Miyama), who leaves Tokyo for the idyllic island hometown of her mother (Yuka) after the death of her dad. Struggling to adjust to life away from the city, Momo is haunted by a note from her father that he was unable to finish prior to his passing. Just when she begins making new friends, Momo is stricken by a haunting of another sort — three ancient goblins, dim but well-intentioned imps cut from the Monsters, Inc.-Toy Story cloth, materialize in her attic, ready to raise general hell. One’s sweet, one’s dumb and one’s sarcastic, and they’re all there for a shared purpose that doesn’t become clear to the conflicted young girl until the moment she needs it to. Wise and fantastical as they may be, the monsters are brutal jackasses, stealing watermelons from elderly farmers and tearing cute baby boars away from their mothers (so they can eat them!) like total dickheads. Their aid in Momo’s growth and development seems to be more incidental than anything else, but that doesn’t mean kids (and their parents) won’t be able to glean something from what she’s forced to go through. Okiura keeps the attention of animation fanatics with his skill and labor alone, harnessing the fragile sense of imagination software jockeys sometimes bungle.