Director Ayumu Watanabe navigates the growing pains of a young girl, coping with life on a houseboat with her mother and the tragicomic dramas of school life

Compared to the cosmically grand anime Children of the Sea, Ayumu Watanabe’s new film is a more intimately scaled coming-of-age story that acutely understands the embarrassment that teenagers have towards their parents once puberty hits. A rotund woman with a bubbly personality, Lady Nikuko – “the Meaty Lady” – has a weakness for food, questionable dirtbags and corny puns. Her snoring rumbles through her modest houseboat like a mini earthquake. To her shy, scrawny daughter Kikurin, she is simply too much.

In fact, despite the title, the film is all about Kikurin’s internal world, as the young girl navigates friend-drama at school and her secret crush on the equally timid Ninomiya, a boy who likes to make outrageously silly faces when no one is watching. Reflecting the contrast between Kikurin’s bookish self-consciousness and Nikuko’s larger-than-life presence, Watanabe’s animation style is charmingly varied. The serene coastal town is realistically rendered with winding streets and lush forests, while Lady Nikuko’s riotous facial expressions are more cartoonishly drawn. She is indeed a force of nature that has taken the community by storm. While Nikuko’s antics are endearing, she is also the butt of many visual gags, which suggests the film wants to have its cake and eat it too. The infantilisation of Nikuko can feel like a cheap source of comic relief, yet when the film reaches its moving conclusion, her characterisation comes off as a counterpoint to Kikurin’s growing pains.