Summer Days with Coo

Summer Days with Coo (2007) is Keiichi Hara's Japanese anime, which you can watch online on iFILM. A schoolboy named Koichi picks up a hardened lump of mud by the river, washes it off at home, and wakes a kappa — a water spirit from old folklore that has slept for more than two hundred years.

The little creature is called Coo, and he is the last of his kind. The Uehara family quietly takes him in, and Koichi travels north with his new friend to Tono, a town steeped in kappa legends, hoping to find others like him. They find no one. Worse, the press gets wind of a talking kappa, reporters lay siege to the house, and Coo is dragged onto a TV show as the season's freak sensation.

Hara made no cute fairy tale here. It is a clear-eyed film about bullying, loneliness and growing up, with room for death, human cruelty and real tenderness. The film took the Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year. At 138 minutes it is worth showing to older kids and watching yourself. Stream Summer Days with Coo (2007) online on iFILM.