‘Odd Taxi: In the Woods’: Tokyo joyride runs out of steam

Hiroshi Odokawa is a middle-aged taxi driver living in Tokyo. He’s also a walrus.

There are many animated works that swap out humans for animal avatars, but few are as charmingly pedestrian as “Odd Taxi,” a 13-episode anime series that aired in 2021. Odokawa and his pals may look like walruses, cats and monkeys, but there’s no swinging from the trees going on here. These animals lead normal Tokyo lives, shuffling between work, the sauna and the local watering hole while searching for love, money or fame.

Odokawa (played by Natsuki Hanae, who’s best known for boyish roles and whose voice is down a solid octave here) is a bit of a loner, perfectly content to ferry people around the city while otherwise keeping to himself, aside from the occasional drink with his friend, a white gibbon named Kakihana (Kappei Yamaguchi), and the local physician, a gorilla named Goriki (Ryohei Kimura). That’s until he’s pulled into a series of interconnected incidents all stemming from the disappearance of a young woman from Odokawa’s part of town. There are even rumors that the walrus himself may be involved.

“Odd Taxi: In the Woods,” directed by Baku Kinoshita, is a theatrical version of the series released on TV a year ago. Like many so-called compilation films, it’s essentially a recut of the series, compressed to fit into a two-hour runtime and with some extra scenes and dialogue.

These sorts of films have a long history in the anime world. At their best, they can help trim the fat, stripping down an unwieldy, hard-to-recommend series to something more digestible. (The most famous example might be the film trilogy assembled from the original “Mobile Suit Gundam” series from 1979.) They can also update the animation quality or resolve twists that had left fans scratching their heads.

“In the Woods” is set up in a similar vein, removing the excess and focusing solely on the incident that gave the series its thrust. In pieces of new footage, several characters from the series are interviewed by an unseen interrogator, reminding the audience how they came to meet Odokawa and become involved in the incident.

Unfortunately, the effect of this chopped-down version is to drain a lot of what made “Odd Taxi” so appealing in the first place. Made up of only 13 episodes, the series didn’t feel particularly unwieldy, and the material that’s been removed — mostly fun character moments — are what gave the series its, well, character. Worse still, there are many plot threads that are left hanging, so if this is your first introduction to “Odd Taxi,” you may walk away confused and frustrated. For hardcore fans, the most enticing part of this theatrical version is no doubt the new epilogue, which runs about five minutes, but it’s hard to argue that segment alone is worth the price of admission.

“Odd Taxi” may feature crime, kidnapping and other thrills, but the real charm is in its portrayal of the people (or animals, as the case may be) that populate modern Tokyo and their everyday disappointments and dreams. The original series made me want to hop in a taxi and ride around the city. Meanwhile, “Odd Taxi: In the Woods” may yield some fun for completists, but it mostly proves that sometimes less is just less.