Okko's Inn

Okko's Inn (2018) is a Japanese anime film from Kitaro Kosaka that you can watch online on iFILM. Schoolgirl Oriko — everyone calls her Okko — loses her parents in a car crash and moves in with her grandmother, who runs an old hot-spring ryokan.

Grandmother starts grooming her to take over the inn: greeting guests, laying tables, keeping the place running. It's hard on Okko, with the grief too fresh and the rules too many. Her help comes from an unlikely friend, the ghost of a boy named Uribo whom only she can see at first, and later a few other spirits of the ryokan. Every guest arrives carrying some private hurt, and in tending to theirs, the girl slowly works through her own.

Kosaka trained as an animator in the Studio Ghibli tradition, and it shows in every frame — soft linework, warm light, the small domestic details of a Japanese inn. Under the children's-book plot sits an honest reckoning with loss and how to keep going, with no sugar and no lectures. It's family filmmaking that lands just as hard for adults as for kids. Stream Okko's Inn online on iFILM.