The anime movie Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko is bold, bright, and surprisingly cruel

polygon.com:

It’s important to know from the start that the anime movie Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko is eventually going to a place of warm acceptance, but it’s a long, awkward, and often cruel journey to get there. Animated by Studio 4°C and helmed by Children of the Seaand Komi Can’t Communicate director Ayumu Watanabe, Lady Nikuko is a glowingly beautiful film that on first viewing seems to have a surprisingly ugly heart. It takes some distance and some thought to get past what initially feels like the movie’s main message: “Fat people are gross and disgusting, obviously, but they’re somehow capable of humanity, too.”

There’s more to it than that, and possibly there’s significantly more nuance in the Kanako Nishi novel that inspired the film. But in the same way American comedies about man-children growing up (Knocked Up and their ilk) spend far more time on gleeful stoner antics than on the final-act messaging about moving past that phase of life, Lady Nikuko spends much of its run time and energy on exaggerated mockery of a fat lady before eventually, grudgingly acknowledging her as a person.

The Lady Nikuko of the title is Nikuko Misuji, an energetic, brash waitress who lives on a small boat in a small coastal town along with her vague, drifty 11-year-old daughter Kikuko. Nikuko is larger than life in every way. Kikuko narrates an opening montage tracking her mother’s early history, bouncing from city to city and job to job as one opportunistic, predatory man after another dominated her life. Nikuko is childlike and simple, given to screaming “Yummy!” over food or “Yaaay!” when her reluctant daughter agrees to a trip to the local aquarium. She loves complicated kanji puns and number puns. She loves her daughter, her job, and